Ben Whitelaw: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation. It's January the eighth, 2026. My name is Ben Whitelaw and I'm joined by Mike Masnick

Mike Masnick: 0:21

I would've gotten that wrong. I would've said 2025.

Ben Whitelaw: 0:25

I've written it down as 2025, but I'm so in the zone this year, Mike, that I've actually, I was able to correct it as I went.

Mike Masnick: 0:33

There you go. That, that is professionalism

Ben Whitelaw: 0:37

Don't tell the listeners

Mike Masnick: 0:39

too late.

Ben Whitelaw: 0:40

how's your 2026 treating you?

Mike Masnick: 0:42

Uh, it's, it's been about as terrible as 2025. I mean, I don't know if you've looked around the world lately, Ben, uh, or specifically in my part of the world, but it's a, it's pretty big mess.

Ben Whitelaw: 0:55

Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 0:56

you know, I sort of hope that maybe, you know, got a couple weeks off and relax a little bit, see some friends and family and, uh, maybe 20, 26 would get off to a better start. But, uh, no such luck yet.

Ben Whitelaw: 1:09

No, no continuation of a theme, I would say.

Mike Masnick: 1:12

Yeah, you could say that. Uh, did you have, did you have good holidays?

Ben Whitelaw: 1:17

Yeah, it was nice. Uh, saw lots of family, detached from the news and the world, and so I've been hit, as you say, by the realities of what we're facing. but I think, you know, nicely back in the chair with you, we've got a, a fun episode today. We're gonna do something a little bit different,

Mike Masnick: 1:34

very different. More than a little.

Ben Whitelaw: 1:36

Very different. Very different. If you've tuned in listeners thinking that you're gonna get your traditional roundup of the kind of major stories from this week's content moderation and online speech news, you are. Be disappointed. Um, however,

Mike Masnick: 1:51

we're, we're about nothing, if not disappointing our listeners.

Ben Whitelaw: 1:54

yeah, it's a, it's an opening of sadness and disappointment. Um, but it will get better. we are going to look ahead to 2026. We're going to try and add in the element of, fun and perhaps a, an element of joy as well. We are not gonna do bold predictions. We promised our listeners we wouldn't do that. Mike. we're not doing resolutions. I don't really believe in those, but we are going to brainstorm live today on the podcast, our very own control Alt speech 2026 Bingo card, which. As I say it aloud, sounds a bit crazy. what I was thinking, Mike, is that we could, rather than kind of produce a forecast for the year, but essentially provide a kind of companion, a drinking companion. You might say, if, you know, if you're into the liquor, but a companion for people to. listen to the podcast each week and to, essentially kind of follow along the stories and together we'll kind of assess the news, that we discuss every week on the podcast. Through the medium of the bingo card. So each square I propose will represent a speech or moderation moment that we will come to expect, or, perhaps slightly more random ones that we, haven't seen before, but, might do in the next 12 months. And, today we're gonna start that process of, creating that Bingo card, but I also want our listeners to help with that process too. So as we go today, we're gonna come up with the first few squares of our Bingo card, but we also want people to, contribute. We want people to get involved. And so if you think listeners that we've missed, uh, particularly kind of, standout moment. If we've missed, a UK speech regulator that's overreached in its regulation, or maybe a Sam Altman Safety gaf, and we haven't included that as a square. get it into us. Send it in via email at podcast@controlaltspeech.com.

Mike Masnick: 3:39

and I should note like any such bingo card, part of the goal here is like, some of them should be easy and some of them should not. So, so stretch goals we're all for that. If you think something totally crazy might happen, might possibly happen, we want a few of those to put onto the, the Bingo card.

Ben Whitelaw: 3:55

Exactly. The more creative, the more farfetched, the better in some, some regards. So there's lots of ways you can get in touch with us via email. You can reply to one of Mike's many blue sky posts. you can also slide into my LinkedIn dms in a professional manner. and we've already had some people get in touch with us with some ideas in advance of today's recording. So we're gonna share

Mike Masnick: 4:17

That that's.

Ben Whitelaw: 4:18

of today.

Mike Masnick: 4:19

I posted on Blue Sky. It's not that that people psychically knew we were going to do this. I did warn some people on Blue Sky and, and we've already gotten a bunch of suggestions and maybe if we have time at the end of the podcast, we'll go through some of the, the first suggestions that we've seen.

Ben Whitelaw: 4:33

Yeah. Sounds great. and if today goes well, Mike, we'll share the finished finger card via the control speech website and if you are a company, if you're a policy organization or even a bingo chain. That wants to sponsor, said Bingo card. We're all is,

Mike Masnick: 4:52

Yeah, reach out to us.

Ben Whitelaw: 4:54

Cool. So let's give this a go. before we jump in though, we should flag that we've got a really great spotlight episode coming on the feed tomorrow, Mike, with the oversight board. spotlight episodes are one of our sponsored formats where we try and create really kind of rich in-depth conversations in partnership with organizations that also care and are involved in the online speech and safety space. And I had a great conversation over the holiday period with a couple of the oversight board members. And we're gonna release that on the feed tomorrow. really looking at their five year report that they publish just before Christmas and some of what the oversight board has achieved in that period. So one to look out for.

Mike Masnick: 5:34

And it's, you know, I think that is an important thing. I mean, there's been, so, there was so much attention and hype around the oversight board when it first came about, and now it's been five years and I think it's an important time to take a look and, and see what they've done.

Ben Whitelaw: 5:46

Yeah, definitely. I really appreciate that conversation. So are gonna kick us off Mike, with our bingo card today. what should be one of the squares on the control alt speech 2026 Bingo card.

Mike Masnick: 5:57

Whew. There are so many, many to choose from. We started brainstorming a few of these. and so we are, just gonna discuss a few, uh, but one that I thought would be fun and interesting, and I'm sort of trying to figure out exactly how to formulate it in a sort of, short, punchy, bingo card format, is the idea that with all of the attempts right now going on. Around AI regulation around the world, and particularly in the US deregulation around ai, that this is going to come into direct conflict with other types of internet speech regulation, in particular social media regulation. We've seen a little bit of this in some form or another where, you know, there was this proposal which went nowhere. Last year, I almost said earlier this year because my brain has not fully got there yet. But, last year where there, there was this attempt to put this like 10 year moratorium on any states regulating ai. And the definitions in that, bill were so broadly written that they would have actually obliterated a bunch of state laws around privacy and content moderation around social media. I. And so I still think that there is a chance that, particularly the effort in the US to deregulate AI or block regulations from AI are actually going to come into direct conflict with other regulations that the, the very same politicians want. So, the. Example I'll raise was, you know, late in the year Marsha Blackburn released this crazy, editorializing crazy bill, which she calls it the Trump America AI Act. Let's see if you can figure out through your perceptive nature, who she's trying to appeal to with that name. it spells something out, but if you actually read the spelling out, it doesn't actually spell out Trump America ai. Act because our politicians can't spell, or they just fed it to chat, GPT or more likely grok and tried to get a acronym out of, you know, they came up with Trump America AI act first and then tried to turn it into something. It doesn't actually spell that. If you, there's an extra I that doesn't show up and there's a, a bee that might show up in the middle of America. Ambe anyways. that's not the point. The point is that this, weird attempt by the current political elite to, curry favor with the AI industry is kind of weird and maybe indirect conflict with their, at the exact same time, desire to punish. Social media companies and the bills that they're coming up with are sort of, at counter purposes. And so, so the argument here is that there will be some sort of effort where these two things come into conflict. And so I think sort of the simplest way to put it is like that a I deregulation will somehow undermine social media regulation, but we'll see what, what format that actually takes.

Ben Whitelaw: 8:49

Yeah. Interesting. do you think, Mike, this is, a kind of natural state of things as AI becomes the kind of bear moth that it is, like, are we seeing. the kind of way that politicians are pandering to these companies feels similar to the way that they did with some of the big social media platforms back when they were kind of emerging. And the importance of these companies, for particularly the United States kind of economic growth is somewhat of a parallel. Is it just because the AI companies are the hot new thing that they're, doing this and. throwing it forward, do you foresee the AI companies facing the same fate that the social media platforms have in, being under pressure?

Mike Masnick: 9:29

Yeah. And to be clear, I mean some of the companies are the same companies, right? So, so, but you know, I think there are a few elements. I think there's some of that. One is that sort of like the new hotness, you know, the other element is that, right now the American economy, certainly. Is almost entirely propped up based on the boom in AI and bubble or boom, depends on how you wanna define it or where things end up going forward a few years and, and how this continues to play out. and so, I think that there are. Political reasons for embracing the AI companies. Right. You know, some of the backers of those companies have, obviously Cozied up with Donald Trump in particular, and Trump needs them not just for like. Campaign contributions. but also because if they start collapsing then the American economy that he wants to claim is going really well. shows itself to not really be going well other than for like a group of, massively potentially overvalued companies. And so, that comes into play. but yeah, I mean, you know, you go back. 15 years or whatever, and the big tech companies at the time were, you know, everybody was hyped about them and, talking about things there. you know, so I think it's, there are some similarities. I think the scale is, different this time. There is also this weird bit for better or for worse, and in some cases I definitely think for worse, where you have. There are politicians who feel that they miss the boat on regulating social media, and therefore they feel like, oh, we can't let that happen again. And so they're in some ways overreacting to the world of ai. And so you have all of these different factors that are coming into play. and also just sort of a general misunderstanding of technology, which is something that never goes outta style. Uh, and you know, maybe that's a bingo card, uh, item is, you know, how badly politicians misunderstand tech and how it works and what different regulations will actually mean. so you have these, competing factors and you have some people who just wanna like, reign in big tech or, stop bad stuff without really understanding what. the regulations will actually do. And then you have people who wanna prop up the economy. You have people who wanna, be transactional and help friendly companies. there are very few people involved in the, the sort of look at the regulatory process right now that I think are genuinely, genuinely looking at what is actually going to be the most beneficial overall for the people, you know, for society. and so. That always worries me a little bit, but you know, the way I am sort of trying to, zero in on that is this idea that the messy and ignorant AI regulations will conflict with messy and ignorant social media regulations.

Ben Whitelaw: 12:11

Yeah, and it's almost like a given now that, some of these questions of how we regulate these companies, which are the kind of platforms where so much online speech happens is inherently political. You know, that's, that's not a card we could introduce because it would be almost like a free card. it might be suitable for the kind of middle

Mike Masnick: 12:32

the center square. Yeah,

Ben Whitelaw: 12:33

Right, which, you know, moderation is political and politics is kind of moderation is, is something that we talked a lot about on the podcast. So kind of beyond that now.

Mike Masnick: 12:42

Yeah, I mean, part of it is just the fact that like these industries are super powerful and they're super powerful in ways that influence society. And when you have super powerful companies that can influence society in some way or another, they inherently become political because the fight is then who controls that, And so this is my whole concern with sort of, companies that. Too large, too powerful and too centralized is then it just becomes a battle over who controls it. And so there was a battle over social media and who controls social media, who, turns the, the dials and now there's a battle over who controls AI companies and who will turn the dials as more and more people are relying on ai. So that is all inherently political, even if there are other factors involved in thinking through the regulations as well.

Ben Whitelaw: 13:23

Yeah. Yeah, no, agreed. I mean, I think, politicians' ignorance is something that I wanna put on our bingo card in the form of, the phrase politicians demand a magic automated system. Okay,

Mike Masnick: 13:38

Yes.

Ben Whitelaw: 13:39

because I think this made a return in 2025 in quite a big way. it felt like, you know, maybe a decade or so ago, politicians were grappling with Web 2.0 and they, they would say things that was kind of so out of kilter with what was possible in terms of the internet and technology that they were often kind of laughed at. And I, we, I feel like as the AI boom has. emerged on us that we're seeing a return to that. the thing that most stuck in my mind about last year was Nigel Farage, in response to a, a story about the online Safety Act, saying that his party, reform had some of the best tech brains in the world and was going to deploy them, to kind of fix the

Mike Masnick: 14:18

This is, this is the nerd harder argument. If, if only the nerds nerded harder, they would fix all these problems. It's just like so unrealistic, but.

Ben Whitelaw: 14:29

Exactly, exactly. And you know, what, these politicians fail to understand that it's very hard to know and to agree what harm is. it's actually, once you've agreed what that looks like, it's often very hard technically to spot that. And in that, it's very difficult to do that time and time again at scale. so the kind of ignorance of the politicians in how these matters work means that they believe that there is this magic wand that they could just wave.

Mike Masnick: 14:54

Yeah. and I'm gonna push back on the use of the word hard there because I would argue that these are impossible. And when you say the word hard, it's hard to figure this out. It's hard to come up with technical systems that suggests, again, if you only nerd it harder, you could figure out a way to do it. The reality is that lots of this involves very, very subjective decision making over what is the harm, who is harmed, how would you stop it? And each of those has massive trade-offs and nobody wants to recognize that or deal with that. And so they assume that oh, you know. This is obviously bad because I think it's bad and therefore it should be stopped, and why doesn't everybody else see that? And very few people can take that step outside of their own head and look at this and, and recognize that one, that there are trade-offs and if you stop harm to some people, you may be doing real harm to other people. But also not everybody agrees on what is the harm and which ones are more serious, or even what the measure is to stop it. It's easy to say, ban this, stop that. When you don't realize how much other harm that might be doing to other people. or how impossible it is to actually stop activities that people want to do. And so, yeah, the, magic wish thinking, the wave, the magic wand thinking, that is definitely going to happen.'cause that happens every year.

Ben Whitelaw: 16:10

Yeah, and I actually think this square could be crossed out multiple times, uh, over the course of the year. I think, I think we might end up on the podcast referring to politicians who have done this, who have said this. more often than we'd like to admit. and I, and I kind of foresee, to be honest, this happening most when, when a public figure or a politician gets caught up in this,'cause that's where, the issue's gonna really come to the fore, is if, political figures are they get moderated or they get down ranked in some form and, and then it becomes a kind of perpetuating story in itself where, The issue is both the fact that they were moderated and the fact that the better moderation systems don't work and don't exist. So, I look forward to that when that happens. Inevitably,

Mike Masnick: 16:51

Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 16:51

I would say on, on the issue of, the impossibility of content moderation at scale. Another candidate for our Bingo card, Mike, I would say is that AI finally. helps platforms moderate at scale in a meaningful way.

Mike Masnick: 17:05

Ooh.

Ben Whitelaw: 17:06

Yeah. so I'm somewhat reluctant to include this, um, because we, we know that, and we've talked about it a lot on the podcast and you've written about it a lot yourself, that AI struggles to deal with, Context and language and satire and creating moderation systems that have elements of AI to spot these things is very, very difficult. Right? Which is why you, you know, the mass nick impossibility theorem exists. I also am, you know, fairly skeptical of companies and, VCs and anybody who says that it's, very straightforward to do. many, many platforms have. Humans in the loop. They have humans working on content moderation at various levels of the process, at various parts of the process. And so you kind of don't want to. In the past, I've not wanted to believe the hype, however. You know, there is increasing amounts of, really interesting research coming out of various conferences you went to one last year that you can talk about and various kind of small startups and you know, even a paper that some meta researchers put out before Christmas that I was reading just before we started recording, that suggests that, the increase capacity of these big frontier models to do content moderation might mean. That we make strides in, in how mentation is done. and I, I'm almost skeptical of, of it myself, but that's why I think it's a great addition to the Bingo card. what do you think?

Mike Masnick: 18:33

Yeah. And, and obviously we discussed this, especially the episode that, we had with Dave Wilner, who has made it his mission to disprove my masnick impossibility theory. and he's doing work towards that. and so there's lots of interesting stuff happening. My question in terms of this as a bingo. Card thing is, how would, how would we determine if we could check that off? How do you determine that? AI moderation has actually made me obsolete in my, my warnings of the impossibility of doing good content moderation at scale. like, I, I think it's, self-evident that AI technology helps, is very helpful for anyone doing any kind of content moderation, trust and safety work. I think what'll be really interesting to me. In this space is seeing if the AI tools allow for more personalization in it as opposed to one centralized top-down system that determines what is allowed and what is not allowed on any platform. I think the really impressive and cool part about. AI technology is that we can customize it much more and we could set our own sort of rules, not just, you know, there, may be a superseding set of rules that a large company provides, but having individual rules that you could provide and say, you know what? I really, really hate American football. You know, you as a UK. Believer in, whatever it is you guys call football over there. Um, you don't want to ever see anything about the NFL on your feed, and you could just add that in as a policy that no social media service is ever going to, you know, they're not gonna enforce that as a general rule, but you could enforce it yourself. I think that is a really interesting thing, though. I don't know where or how that shows up in a way that we could check it off on the Bingo card. So I'm gonna challenge you on that.

Ben Whitelaw: 20:25

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I. I'm not saying that we should trust platforms when they say these things, but I fully expect some of the big platforms to, by the end of the year, kind of espouse the great progress that they've made in moderating content at scale, in their use of, of some of these big models, potentially their own, potentially other companies like I've, I think that this will become they will try to press release and publicize the great improvements that they made in content moderation because it's such a political issue, because it's such a big regulatory issue. They will, be quick to, I think,

Mike Masnick: 20:59

they'll use the AI as a look how good we're doing because of these AI tools, these LLMs or whatever. It's in the

Ben Whitelaw: 21:07

Exactly. And, and we should never, we should never believe a kind of press release. but I think that's a kind of behavior we'll

Mike Masnick: 21:12

So I think, I think that the clarification we make here is that company claims AI allows for, for the moderation at scale. And so I that, that one I can get behind.

Ben Whitelaw: 21:24

I like it. Okay. This is, this is, this is going well so far.

Mike Masnick: 21:27

There we go. So I'm gonna take that where, I'm concerned about the, the vague and thing where it's not clear if this is going to be hit and go with one that is very, will be very, very clear that we can determine whether or not this happens. And that is whether or not in the United States section two 30 of the Communications Decency Act gets repealed or not. So I'm gonna say put it on the bingo spot. I don't want this to happen. I don't think it should happen. I am still kind of hopeful that it won't happen, but I'm going to put on the damn bingo card. That section two 30 gets repealed.

Ben Whitelaw: 21:59

I like it. It's, it's binary. We know a hundred percent. we'll probably talk about it in multiple

Mike Masnick: 22:03

yes, except, except that, you know, the pushback here is that someone will say there's going to be some sort of, instead of a full on repeal, there may be an attempt at reform, which is probably effectively repeal. And, I've had an article about this for years, talking about how almost every attempt at reforming two 30 is really a hidden repeal. We could argue about that, but let's just go with the full on. Because there is a bill that has been introduced and there's going to be hearings next month, specifically on just a flat out repeal of section two 30. So I think we just need to, put that on the bingo card. I think with that there will be a, ridiculous amount of miss and disinformation about section two 30 because it is, as we have discussed, one of the laws that almost no one seems to understand and people, of all political persuasions seem to hate it. For opposite reasons because they don't understand it often, contradictory reasons. but you know, because of that, I think it is very possible that this year, much to, my chagrin, section two 30 will be repealed.

Ben Whitelaw: 23:09

Interesting, and obviously this is a pretty special year for section two 30 as well, right?

Mike Masnick: 23:14

Yes.

Ben Whitelaw: 23:15

So 30th anniversary.

Mike Masnick: 23:15

It is in February next month, uh, we will hit 30 years of section two 30.

Ben Whitelaw: 23:21

And, and there's a tech, commemorative coin to, to honor the moment, which we should mention. can you still get a, a coin?

Mike Masnick: 23:28

Uh, so we have, ended the sales, the sales ended of the coin earlier this week. Uh, we did have a couple of late comers, uh. put in some money towards the coin and we might be able to squeeze out a few extra coins if you get in your support very, very quickly. Um, but the official, fundraising campaign for the ER, section two 30, 30 year commemorative coin, is officially over.

Ben Whitelaw: 23:53

Got it. good to plug. so, the anniversary plus obviously these, cases that might start to reform or repeal Section two 30 suggests that there is. There is a need to kind of, I guess, talk more about it. do you kind of foresee more people engaging with what section 32 30 does what it protects and what it doesn't protect in this year? and, and could we build that into maybe a, a separate card? is there something that comes before the repeal that we should be thinking about as a card here?

Mike Masnick: 24:22

Maybe, I mean, there are a few different things that we could, could explore, right? So there, there have been questions, and there were questions this week in particular around the way GR on X is generating, pictures, deep fake pictures of, you know, women in bikinis. which is. For whatever reasons suddenly become very popular. And there are debates over whether or not Section two 30 applies to LLM generated content. and that is a trickier question than people would like to believe. beyond just the section two 30 question in particular, but the larger question related to it is who is responsible if an LLM generates content that in some form or another, and then you have all sorts of other questions, violates the law. And that is in some sense a two 30 question and in some sense, not a two 30 question, but it is raising questions and is making people think through section two 30 because at its heart, section two 30 was always about where do we put the liability when Some sort of content that violates the law in some form or another is placed online. And now we have this sort of new world in which we have non-humans generating content and you have questions about who is liable in those cases. And so there's something to be thought about in terms of where does liability lie, not just in pure social media, but also in. LLM generated content, which is a big open question. And we may see, we already see litigation certainly where there's the cases, the suicide cases, and you know, people talk about, AI psychosis or whatever. There are a whole bunch of different cases popping up where there are questions about who would be liable in, in these different situations. And I think. maybe there's a bingo card, in that in terms of like, you know, how a court rules on liability as it relates to LLMs.

Ben Whitelaw: 26:20

Yeah. As a kind of precursor to a full repeal, that can be interesting. Yeah. okay. Well. not a great prospect, but definitely one that we can, we can measure come the end of the year. I mean, another one that, that I had Mike, which I feel is pretty binary, pretty one that we could measure is, around age verification. And yeah, we're back on that train. Um, you know, 2025 was full of, maybe if you looked at all the podcasts that we did, maybe one of the. Topics we spoke about most in various forms. There was, dozens of state laws in the US that tried to impose some form age verification. We had in the UK Ofcom introduce the kind of age assurance requirements, which led to many platforms. implementing an age assurance or age verification technology, so people had to upload IDs or, do a facial scan in order to receive access to some, parts of the platforms and in the EU as well. They were slightly behind parts of the world, but were starting to clarify the way that they were thinking about age verification. and even kind of in some elements crossing over with the kinda digital identity, conversation, which is happening in, various parts as well. So we're seeing a kind of, I guess, more and more countries thinking about how they do age verification. there's the Kids Online Safety Act as well, Mike, which is still alive. Uh, changes form seemingly every week.

Mike Masnick: 27:45

Well, I will say that the, it was a version of the Kids Online Safety Act was included in the Trump America AI Act, which rolled together a bunch of these different pills, but yes, yes, it is still out there.

Ben Whitelaw: 27:56

Got it. So, so, you know, I think there's definitely a card in, yet another age verification law passes. and again, I think this is when we would end up ticking off a bunch of times in the course of the year

Mike Masnick: 28:06

I was gonna say that's, that's a pretty easy one. I, I, I wonder if there's, you know, the bigger question is that there are some legal challenges around the age verification laws. And, and certainly in 2025, you know, age verification went to the Supreme Court, but, specifically only in the context of, adult content and pornography and the ruling there did allow it, which I think. Really actually upended 20 years of First Amendment precedent. and, effectively they don't admit it, but effectively overturning the Ashcroft ruling from the early two thousands. but. A lot of states have sort of taken that ruling to mean that age verification, it's open season on anything. And so we've seen various states put in place age verification for social media, some of which have been struck down, At the end of December, we got, a ruling on, on one of those in Texas. so I think there'll be a fight over that. And so there may be, I don't think we'll get to a Supreme Court ruling on it this year, probably timing wise, I think that would be unlikely. but. there's going to be a lot more court cases determining where and when you can do age verification. The thing that I think will be interesting too, in the age verification space, perhaps more interesting, I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it as a, as a bingo card, is whether or not we begin to see the backlash. Right. I mean, there's been some, straightforward backlash in the UK and in Australia in particular, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of like milestone moments that we're going to see where. Do either of those countries try and adjust the law, recognize that, oh, maybe we went too far. Maybe we need to adjust this and change it in some form. I don't think either of them are likely to repeal it after all this effort to put those laws in place, but I think some sort of admission somehow that the way these laws were initially implemented was a mistake. I think that would be an interesting one to see as well.

Ben Whitelaw: 29:59

Yeah. that's true. I mean, other potential card is around the banning of VPNs in

Mike Masnick: 30:07

Yes.

Ben Whitelaw: 30:08

In some countries because,

Mike Masnick: 30:09

it's come up.

Ben Whitelaw: 30:11

it's come up. Right. It's, it's, it's been discussed in the uk for sure. This idea that because age verification. Now exists, people have started to download VPNs at a much higher rate. there's a, a perception that, that there's children trying to circumnavigate the controls, but in many cases it's, it's adults doing so and. And so, you know, again, in the kind of course of trying to protect the children, save the children. I wonder if, politicians will turn to banning VPNs as a further measure there. Um, obviously at great cost to, online freedoms and privacy and all the other stuff that they provide. So maybe it's another kind of slightly bleak card to include.

Mike Masnick: 30:49

I think that would be interesting. The other thing that I think would be interesting though, I don't know if this would happen within this year, would be sort of in response to that. If you begin to get some jurisdiction, and I am picturing some random, small sparsely populated island somewhere that defines itself as the internet freedom space where VPNs do good business, setting up a, node within that island. And so if you want to avoid age verification, just point your VPN at. Random small country somewhere, and they build up a reputation as like, that's how you get to, to use the internet without age verification, you know, and then some percentage of, of internet services runs through this small island or, or something like that. I could, I could totally see that coming though. I don't know if that, I think that would probably be a response to the VPN issue if that came up,

Ben Whitelaw: 31:48

I like it. it's far fetched, but also possible,

Mike Masnick: 31:52

Yes. Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 31:53

which is the sign of a sign of a good bingo card.

Mike Masnick: 31:55

Yeah, speaking of, maybe farfetched and also circumvention. another one I wanted to toss out was, this is a little bit maybe wonky and I don't, I'm still not entirely sure how we, boil it down to a bingo card, but this sort of came out of, a talk that Corey Dro gave, and apparently he's turning into a book because if you know Corey, he. publishes like six books a year on, on everything, and they're often very thoughtful and, thought provoking. And so he's been talking about this idea, he started earlier in 2025, but he, he sort of, refined the argument around whether or not countries are going to retaliate on American trade war. Through the use of, ignoring or displacing or changing anti circumvention laws. And this can get really deep in the weeds. And I know I love to get really deep in the weeds, you know that I,

Ben Whitelaw: 32:50

Do it, I, I, I'm not familiar with anti circumvention law. So you, you gotta give our listeners the,

Mike Masnick: 32:55

I'm, I'm, I'm gonna try and give you the, the, yeah. The shortest version I can. it's tempting to go really far back on this one, but, so, you know, with the rise of the internet, one of the things that, certain industries noticed was that the internet is by its nature, computers by their nature or giant copying machines. And there are many businesses that showed up in the world that were based on the ability to impose scarcity on content. The, recording industry, movie industry. A few others as well, but those were the main ones, right? So they freaked out about the internet in the 1990s and said, like, oh my gosh, all of our content is gonna get. Sent around for free and we'll have no more business model. And you know, this is the piracy argument, but this was before like Napster era where a bunch of these companies got really mad and said, well, we need to, pass laws to change the internet. And part of it is that no matter what technology we put on to guard whatever digital lock we put around content. What if someone can break those locks? There's always those nasty hackers out there. They're gonna figure out how to break those locks. So we should put in place a law that says if you break a digital lock. You are violating the law. And the story is that a bunch of Hollywood lobbyists pitched that to the US government, in the early 1990s and Congress said, no, we're not gonna do that. and so those very same lobbyists said, okay, fine. Congress if you're not gonna do that, we are going to run to Geneva and get involved in the International Trade Agreement process. There's a whole book about this and they admit it. Like I went to a talk by one of the guys who basically has admitted to exactly this Congress said, no, we went to Geneva, talked to the US trade representative who was negotiating a trade agreement, and we put into the trade agreement that every country that signs onto this trade agreement has to have a provision that outlaws any kind of getting around a technological protection measure. Which is the fancy way of saying a digital lock. and so they passed that in a treaty in the mid nineties that turned into part of the DMCA in the US It's called Section 12 0, 1 of the DMCA, which is less known. Most people know what the DMCA is in the notice and takedown. Which is 5 12, 12 0 1. If you wanna play at home, look it up. Uh, is the section that says you, you can't get around a digital lock. Or if you do that violates the lock. Just getting around it. Not even if you're trying to violate the copyright, just getting around the lock. This is turned into a big mess in a lot of different ways because you have other companies who are like, Ooh, that's cool. So if you are a printer company and you wanna make sure that everyone has to buy the printer cartridge. From your company where the ink in the printer cartridge is the most valuable, liquid in the world. It is more expensive than champagne by many, many magnitudes. It's insane how expensive it is. Because they put a little piece of technological code into the printer. It says, only run on ink that our company sells. And they have argued if you get around that and use a different printer ink cartridge from a competing company, you are violating Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Ben Whitelaw: 36:13

Right.

Mike Masnick: 36:14

There are a number of different examples like this. Lots of people have tried to use these, what they call anti circumvention laws, to try to, you know, lock in their market and jack up prices. I, you know, I could go through tons of examples over decades. The second part of this is then after that there was the countries who signed into that original agreement. But then after that, this became a standard part of every American trade agreement since then, so basically every country that US trades with has been pressured to put in place some sort of anti circumvention law in their local laws so that if anyone tries to get around anything so they have turned this one issue. Into a trade issue. There are arguments, and Corey gets into this and I, I could get into it, but we're I, this is about as deep as I want to go, that, that a lot of the other problems that we face in the world, the lock in the internet giants, the amount of control that they have, the fact that it is very difficult to leave some of these properties that they lock you in is because of these anti circumvention laws. I could go into details why, but this is beyond the scope of this pro, this, this, this discussion. So Corey's argument is that we have accepted this as fine and normal for about 30 years now. It's almost exactly 30 years since this process began. And all these other countries are like, okay, we have to do this. We have to have anti circumvention laws because we put these into these trade agreements that the US pushed. We didn't understand the impact of them. We still don't fully understand the impact of them. But now that the US has launched a trade war with the rest of the world. This is one way that you could hit back. That's Corey's argument. Other countries can say, you know what? We are not going to agree to that anymore. We are not going to have anti circumvention provisions in our thing and our local people, if they wanna break a digital lock. Use other products in ways that we don't want. If you want to jailbreak iPhones so they're not locked to a particular service. If you wanna jailbreak a device and install your own software on it, you're not trapped in Apple's, iOS app store.

Ben Whitelaw: 38:17

Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 38:18

Like let's make that legal around the world. And that is a way to hit back of the US for the trade war. It's really interesting, but you know, it takes a few steps to understand what's going on there.

Ben Whitelaw: 38:27

Yeah. Fascinating. I mean, they, I, I had no idea they played such a pivotal role in some of the topics we, we discuss every week, anti circumvention laws. yeah. I love the idea of having that as a card. let's definitely include that and, um, we should get Corey onto the podcast to talk a bit about not only that forthcoming book, but also here's justification book as well.'cause

Mike Masnick: 38:47

yeah. Absolutely.

Ben Whitelaw: 38:48

it's also a great read and, was one I read over Christmas. okay, Mike, well that gives us a good set, I would say, of squares for our controlled alt speech 2026 Bingo card. we've got a bunch there. I'll probably round them up a sec, but did you wanna go through any of the ones, any of the suggestions from our listeners? People on blue sky that might end up being on the bingo card once we put it all together.

Mike Masnick: 39:11

I did the blue sky just locked me out, so gimme a second. Yes. Yeah, let's, go through some of these. So, so I put out, before we started recording, I put out a request and we have a whole bunch of responses. So, there's the easy one, which, uh, from Ken White, better known as Pope Hat, just posted a, a meme from the Simpsons of Won't somebody please think of the children, which someone is going to say at some point that is like the natural. part of it, uh, somebody brought up the fire in a crowded theater line, which is the classic sort of, misleading excuse for why censorship is needed in some form or another.

Ben Whitelaw: 39:50

Mm-hmm.

Mike Masnick: 39:51

some brought up AI psychosis, privacy is dead. there's a bunch of other interesting ones. I'm sorry, I'm just skimming through this. Uh, here's the European Commission is closely monitoring blanks compliance with the Digital Services Act. Yeah, I think we've already hit that one

Ben Whitelaw: 40:13

Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 40:14

in 2026 already. It's maybe not that far out there. Um, someone saying, oh, AI isn't protected by the First Amendment. So that, that would be an interesting one. is section two 30 a special exemption for big tech? They, they came up with yours. They have AI let you moderate at scale, so you got that one. Um, oh, we must ban algorithms. I think that's a good one, that there'll be some sort of attempt to just ban algorithmic feeds because there's this, belief, which I think is, a misunderstanding that algorithmic feeds are somehow the problem. Um, there, there are a bunch of others. These are really, really good. I think we need to actually. Go through all of these and figure out Now the other thing that we should do, so first of all, if you're listening, you can contribute, you can find the feed on Blue Sky or just bug me on Blue Sky. you can, as Ben said, slide, into his LinkedIn DMS professionally. Um, or you can email us, at podcast@controlaltspeech.com. But one thing we need to decide. That middle square, we mentioned it earlier, but the middle square is the free square. That's the easy one, right? That's the one that everybody automatically gets and we need something for that. So my proposal

Ben Whitelaw: 41:26

Go on.

Mike Masnick: 41:26

is that it should be something to do with Elon Musk because there's no way he's not gonna be in the news in some form or another. But how do we, how do we define that square? And you can come up with other suggestions, but I, I think, I think it feels like it needs to be an Elon Musk Square.

Ben Whitelaw: 41:43

just Elon Musk,

Mike Masnick: 41:44

Elon Musk does something stupid. Is the, is the

Ben Whitelaw: 41:50

Yeah. Yeah. I I I like that. That's, gonna be a, a theme. No doubt. I would say, I'm tempted to make it. Control or speech related, and I'm, I'm tempted to make it that you will be accused, you'll be accused of blue sky bias after I forget to ding the bell when we discuss

Mike Masnick: 42:11

Right, the disclaimer bell,

Ben Whitelaw: 42:14

I think that's inevitable in some form, you know, not just because, I often forget the bell, but because you know, people like accusing you of, of blue sky bias generally. So

Mike Masnick: 42:22

everyone likes to, to accuse me of blue sky bias.

Ben Whitelaw: 42:25

Yeah. So,

Mike Masnick: 42:27

I mean, we could consider other, Controlled speech specific squares on here. there's uh, a question of, where we might pop up in the world,

Ben Whitelaw: 42:35

maybe we'll do an event in a far-flung country.

Mike Masnick: 42:38

there's a possibility.

Ben Whitelaw: 42:39

Yeah, feel free to invite us to, to wherever you are, whatever conference you're attending. We'd love to do that. but yeah, lots of options. Lots of options. We, we are very open to listeners' ideas and suggestions. Um, we want this to be a kind of collaborative process. We want, you all to feel like you can have this at your, at your hand as you listen to us. Every single week, during 2026. so yeah, we made a great start, Mike, but lots to do. Uh, the plan is, as I said, is that we'll release the full card in the next week or two with our listeners' suggestions, and they will be able to play as they listen, all year round.

Mike Masnick: 43:15

if people wanna sponsor it, let us know. And if people happen to win bingo, you get a line across in one way or another, you have to let us know. We'll see who the first person is, who can get bingo from one of our cards.

Ben Whitelaw: 43:28

Yeah, we'll have to maybe provide a prize, incentivize our listeners. What have we done? What have we done?

Mike Masnick: 43:34

What have we committed to?

Ben Whitelaw: 43:37

Um, well, let's leave it there, Mike. I think we've made a great start. thanks to our listeners in advance for joining us at the start of the year. Thanks for taking part in our control or speech Bingo card for 2026. we look forward to talking to you much more during the course of the year and bringing you the, the must listen to stories about content moderation, online speech and internet regulation. Thanks for tuning in. We'll speak to you soon.

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