Today's links

• Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping with plenty; "The Shakedown"; Chickenized reverse-centaurs; France v iTunes; Copyfight discipline; Mystery lobbyists; "Where the Axe is Buried"; Free/open microprocessor; Folk models of computer security; Bug-eyed steampunk mask; Academics embracing Wikipedia.
• Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Understaffing as a form of enshittification (permalink)

At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.

Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.

But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.

The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.

The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.

This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.

Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.

Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).

Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base.

In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:

https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/

Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."

As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.

There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/

The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.

Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).

Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/31/1139783599/new-york-nursing-home-owners-drained-cash?ft=nprml&f=853198417

Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.

Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.

Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html

Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."

As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.

Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.

Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.

I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

"We did this with AI" has become a synonym for "We don't care if this is done well":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos

"We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Our algorithmic future – Utopia or Armageddon? https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2026/03/our-algorithmic-future-utopia-or.html

• The Market Definition Trap https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/

• On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/on-spec-2026-new-canadian-literature-of-the-fantastic

• Day 7: Ticketmaster's "Velvet Hammer" https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-7-ticketmasters-velvet-hammer

• From Race to the Bottom to Worker Power on the Road https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/from-race-to-the-bottom-to-worker

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

#20yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!) https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/

#20yrsago Coping with plenty – stuff gets cheaper, space gets pricier https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/feb/28/retail.shopping

#20yrsago France will let Microsoft play iTunes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828296.stm

#20yrsago A new discipline to describe the copyfight https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010702/https://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002930.html

#20yrsago Right-wing think-tank hates DRM https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/circumventing-competition-perverse-consequences-digital-millennium-copyright-act#

#20yrsago Reasons to take math in high school https://web.archive.org/web/20060610134055/http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html

#20yrsago Sun ships free and open microprocessor https://web.archive.org/web/20060221112756/http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html

#20yrsago Octavia Butler scholarship will send people of color to Clarion https://web.archive.org/web/20060406161412/https://carlbrandon.org/butlerscholarship/

#20yrsago Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects https://web.archive.org/web/20060505232346/http://www.justicemag.com/daily/item/2590.html

#15yrsago Folk models of home computer security: what we think our PCs are doing https://rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf

#15yrsago Fixers’ Collective: people learning to make broken stuff work again https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/0321/The-art-of-the-fix-it

#15yrsago Bug-eyed monster steampunk mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/158400.html

#15yrsago Scholars to stop pretending they don’t use Wikipedia; will work out best practices instead https://www.bbc.com/news/education-12809944

#15yrsago Electronic publishing Bingo card from John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/20/the-electronic-publishing-bingo-card/

#15yrsago RIP, Mike Glicksohn, Hugo-winning science fiction fan https://file770.com/mike-glicksohn-1946-2011/

#15yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs getting millions https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html

#15yrsago Reluctant witness refuses to admit he knows what a photocopier is https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/03/identifying_photocopy_machine.html

#15yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet

#15yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/

#10yrsago Howto: start a fire with a lemon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2vT665bGI

#10yrsago First order of business for hard-right government: canceling Croatia’s answer to The Daily Show https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/17/satiric-show-pulled-from-croatian-tv-for-intolerance-03-17-2016/bi/all-balkan-countries/

#10yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their cars’ patch-levels current https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/

#10yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider threat” training docs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning

#10yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s backdoor https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html

#10yrsago Russia moots ban on discussions about VPNs, reverse proxies, and other anti-censorship techniques https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-holders-want-site-block-circumvention-advice-banned-160319/

#10yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/

#10yrsago Meet the Commercial Energy Working Group, a lobby group that won’t say who it lobbies for https://web.archive.org/web/20160320150011/https://theintercept.com/2016/03/20/mysterious-powerful-lobbying-group-wont-even-say-who-its-lobbying-for/

#5yrsago Support Amazon workers today https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#what-rhymes-with-bezos

#5yrsago Department of Truth https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#dot

#5yrsago The political possibility of cities https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/21/ex-urbe/#arcology-politics

#5yrsago Aviation bailout cost $666k/job https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#aa

#5yrsago Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue

#5yrsago Help news, not news-barons https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#big-news

#5yrsago Announcing "The Shakedown" https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#monopsony

#5yrsago Chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

#1yrago You can't save an institution by betraying its mission https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it

#1yrago AI can't do your job https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

#1yrago Ray Nayler's "Where the Axe Is Buried" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1034 words today, 54661 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil," reports the blog It's FOSS. They note that the field "can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves" — it's the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location: Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is "an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional. " In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here. "It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

“I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously broad—broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law. 

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

In fact, this backlash proves her point. Beyond attempting to silence queer voices and to scare other legislators from speaking up against these laws, it reveals how age-verification mandates are part of a larger effort to give the government much greater control of what young people are allowed to say, read, or see online. 

Rep. Finke was also right that these proposals are bad policy; they prevent all young people from finding community online, and that they violate young people and adults’ First Amendment rights.

Why FSC v. Paxton Matters

Rep. Finke was similarly right to bring up the Paxton case, because beyond the troubling Supreme Court precedent it produced, Texas’s age-verification law also drew eager support from an extraordinary number of amicus briefs from anti-LGBTQ organizations (some even designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center). 

In FSC v. Paxton, the Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to require age verification for sites where at least one-third of the content is sexual material deemed “harmful to minors,” which generally means explicit sexual content. This ruling, based on how young people do not have a First Amendment right to access explicit sexual content, allows states to enact onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize their data security and privacy. These are real and immense burdens on adults, and the Court was wrong to ignore them in upholding Texas’ law. 

But laws enacted by other states and Minnesota HF 1434 go further than the Texas statute. Rather than restricting young people from accessing sexual content, these proposals expand what the state deems “harmful to minors” to include any speech that may reference sex, sexuality, gender, and reproductive health. But young people have a First Amendment right to both speak on those topics and to access information online about them.

We will continue to fight against all online age restrictions, but bills like Minnesota’s HF 1434, which seek to restrict young people from accessing speech about their bodies, sexuality, and other truthful information, are especially pernicious.

EFF and Rep. Finke are on the same page here: age verification mandates create immense harm to our First Amendment rights, our right to privacy, as well as our online safety and security. These proposals also fully ignore the reality that LGBTQ young people often rely on the internet for information they cannot get elsewhere. 

But the Paxton case, and the coalition behind it, illustrates exactly how these laws can be weaponized. They weren’t there just to stand up for young people’s privacy online—they were there to argue that the state has a compelling interest in shielding minors from material that, in practice, often includes LGBTQ content. Ultimately, these groups would like to age-gate not just porn sites, but also any content that might discuss sex, sexuality, gender, reproductive health, abortion, and more.

Using Children as Props to Enact Censorship 

The coalition of organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of Texas’s age verification law tells us everything we need to know about the true intentions behind legislating access to information online: censorship, surveillance, and control. After all, if the race to age-gate the internet was purely about child safety, we would expect its strongest supporters to be child-development experts or privacy advocates. Instead, the loudest advocates are organizations dedicated to policing sexuality, attacking LGBTQ+ folks and reproductive rights, and censoring anything that doesn’t fit within their worldview.

Below are some of the harmful platforms that the organizations supporting the age-gating movement are advancing, and how their arguments echo in the attacks on Rep. Finke today:

Policing sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights

Many of the organizations backing age-verification laws have spent decades trying to restrict access to accurate sexual health information and reproductive care.

Groups like Exodus Cry, for example, who filed a brief in support of the Texas AG in the SCOTUS case, frame pornography as part of a broader moral crisis. Founded by a “Christian dominionist” activist, Exodus Cry advocates for the criminalization of porn and sex work, and promotes a worldview that defines “sexual immorality” as any sexual activity outside marriage between one man and one woman. Its leadership describes the internet as a battleground in a “pornified world” that has to be reclaimed. Another brief in support of the age-verification law was filed by a group of organizations including the Public Advocate of the United States (an SPLC-designated hate group) and America’s Future. America’s Future is an organization that was formed to “revitalize the role of faith in our society” and fiercely advocates in favor of trans sports bans. 

These groups see age-verification laws as attractive solutions because they create a legal mechanism to wall off large swaths of content that merely mentions sex from not only young people but millions of adults, too.

Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights

Several of the most prominent legal advocates behind age-verification laws have also led the crusade against LGBTQ+ equality. The internet that these groups envision is one that heavily censors critical and even life-saving LGBTQ+ resources, community, and information. 

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), for instance (which is another SPLC-designated hate group), built its reputation on litigation aimed at rolling back LGBTQ+ protections—including  allowing businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples, criminalizing same-sex relationships abroad, and restricting transgender rights. 

Then there’s other groups like Them Before Us and Women’s Liberation Front, both of which submitted amici in support of the Texas Attorney General and are devoted to upending LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Them Before Us says it’s “committed to putting the rights and well-being of children ahead of the desires and agendas of adults.” But it’s also running a campaign to “End Obergefell,” the 2015 Supreme Court case that upheld the right to same-sex marriage, and has been on the cutting edge of transphobic campaigning and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. The Women’s Liberation Front, on the other hand, is an organization that has a long track record of supporting transphobic policies such as bathroom bills, bans on gender-affirming healthcare, and efforts to define “sex” strictly as the biological sex assigned at birth. 

Through cases like FSC v. Paxton, groups like these three continue to advance a vision of society that creates government mandates to enforce their worldviews over personal freedom, while hiding behind a shroud of concern for children’s safety. But when they also describe LGBTQ+ people as “evil” threats to children and run countless campaigns against their human rights, they are being clear about their intentions. This is why we continue to say: the impact of age verification measures goes beyond porn sites.

Expanding censorship beyond the internet into real-life public spaces

As we’ve said for years now, the push to age-gate the internet is part of a broader campaign to control what information people can access in public life both on- and offline. Many of the same organizations advancing these proposals claim to be acting on behalf of young people, but their arguments consistently use children as props to justify giving the government more control over speech and information.

Many of the organizations advocating for online age verification have also supported book bans, attacks on DEI policies and education, and efforts to remove LGBTQ+ materials from schools and libraries. Two of the organizations who supported the Texas Attorney General, Citizens Defending Freedom and Manhattan Institute, have led campaigns around the country to “abolish DEI” and ban classical books like “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison from school libraries. These efforts are not different from the efforts to restrict access to the internet—they reflect a broader strategy to restrict access to ideas or information that these groups find objectionable. And they discourage free thought, inquiry, and the ability for people to decide how to live their lives. 

These campaigns rely on the same core argument, that certain ideas are inherently dangerous to young people and must therefore be restricted. But that framing misrepresents an important reality: if lawmakers genuinely want to address harms that young people experience online, they should start by listening to young people themselves. When EFF spoke directly with young people about their online experiences, they overwhelmingly rejected restrictions on their access to the internet and came back with nuanced and diverse perspectives. Once that principle—that certain ideas are inherently dangerous—is accepted, the internet, once a symbol of free expression, connection, creativity, and innovation, becomes the next logical target. 

This also wouldn’t be the first time a vulnerable group is used as a prop to advance internet censorship laws. We’ve seen this playbook during the debate over FOSTA/SESTA, where many of the same advocates claimed to speak for trafficking victims/survivors and sex workers, while pushing legislation that ultimately censored online speech and harmed the very communities it invoked. It’s a familiar pattern: you invoke a vulnerable group, frame certain speech as a threat, and use that as a way to expand government control over the flow of information. And as we said in the fight against FOSTA: if lawmakers are serious about addressing harms to particular communities, they should start by talking to those communities. This means that lawmakers seeking to address online harms to young people should be talking to young people, not groups who claim their interests. 

Rep. Finke Was Not Radical. She Was Right.

The Paxton case, and the coalition backing age verification laws in the U.S., shows us exactly why the messaging around these laws draws superficial support from parents and lawmakers. But we’ve heard the quiet part said out loud before. Marsha Blackburn, a sponsor of the federal Kids Online Safety Act, has said that her goal with the legislation was to address what she called “the transgender” in society. When lawmakers and advocacy groups frame queer existence itself as a threat to young people, age-verification laws become ideological enforcement instead of regulatory policy.

In defending free speech, privacy, and the right of young people to access truthful information about themselves, Rep. Leigh Finke was not radical—she was right. She was warning that broad, ideologically driven laws will be used to erase, silence, and isolate young people under the banner of child protection. 

What’s at stake in the fight against age verification is not just a single bill in a single state, or even multiple states, for that matter. It’s about whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law. 

And more people in public office need the courage of Rep. Finke to call this out.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI.

It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail.

In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica.

Or, as one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.”

Read full article

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In the race to build the most capable LLM models, several tech companies sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was one of the companies to get sued. In 2023, well-known book authors, including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Meta’s Bittersweet Victory

Last summer, Meta scored a key victory in this case, as the court concluded that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM qualified as fair use, based on the arguments presented in this case. This was a bittersweet victory, however, as Meta remained on the hook for downloading and sharing the books via BitTorrent.

By downloading books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive, Meta relied on BitTorrent transfers. In addition to downloading content, these typically upload data to others as well. According to the authors, this means that Meta was engaged in widespread and direct copyright infringement.

In recent months, the lawsuit continued based on this remaining direct copyright infringement claim. While both parties collected additional evidence through the discovery process, it remained unclear what defense Meta would use. Until now.

Seeding Pirated Books is Fair Use

Last week, Meta served a supplemental interrogatory response at the California federal court, which marks a new direction in its defense. For the first time, the company argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users during the torrent download process also qualifies as fair use.

Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data. In the case of Anna’s Archive, Meta said, the datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads, making BitTorrent the only practical option.

“Meta used BitTorrent because it was a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets, and in the case of Anna’s Archive, those datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads,” Meta’s attorney wrote.

“Accordingly, to the extent Plaintiffs can come forth with evidence that their works or portions thereof were theoretically ‘made available’ to others on the BitTorrent network during the torrent download process, this was part-and-parcel of the download of Plaintiffs’ works in furtherance of Meta’s transformative fair use purpose.”

Part and parcel

In other words, obtaining the millions of books that were needed to engage in the fair use training of its LLM, required the BitTorrent up- and downloading, which ultimately serves the same fair use purpose.

Authors and Meta Disagree over Fair Use Timing

The authors were not happy with last week’s late Friday submission and the new defense. On Monday morning, their lawyers filed a letter with Judge Vince Chhabria flagging the late-night filing as an improper end-run around the discovery deadline.

They point out that Meta had been aware of the uploading claims since November 2024, but that it never brought up this fair use defense in the past, not even when the court asked about it.

The letter specifically mentions that while Meta has a “continuing duty” to supplement discovery under Rule 26(e), this rule does not create a “loophole” allowing a party to add new defenses to its advantage after a court deadline has passed.

“Meta (for understandable reasons) never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after this Court raised the issue with Meta last November,” the lawyers write.

The letter

Meta’s legal team fired back the following day, filing their own letter with Judge Chhabria. This letter explains that the fair use argument for the direct copyright infringement claim is not new at all.

Meta pointed to the parties’ joint December 2025 case management statement, in which it had explicitly flagged the defense, and noted that the author’s own attorney had addressed it at a court hearing days later.

“In short, Plaintiffs’ assertion that Meta ‘never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after’ the November 2025 hearing, is false” Meta’s attorney writes in the letter.

Authors Admit No Harm, No Infringing Output

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Meta’s interrogatory response also cites deposition testimony from the authors themselves, using their own words to bolster its fair use defense.

The company notes that every named author has admitted they are unaware of any Meta model output that replicates content from their books. Sarah Silverman, when asked whether it mattered if Meta’s models never output language from her book, testified that “It doesn’t matter at all.”

Authors’ depositions

Meta argues these admissions undercut any theory of market harm. If the authors themselves cannot point to infringing output or lost sales, the lawsuit is less about protecting their books and more about challenging the training process itself, which the court already ruled was fair use.

These admissions were central to Meta’s fair use defense on the training claims, which Meta won last summer. Whether they carry the same weight in the remaining BitTorrent distribution dispute has yet to be seen.

‘U.S. AI Leadership at Stake’

In its interrogatory response, Meta added further weight by stressing that its investment in AI has helped the U.S. to establish U.S. global leadership, putting the country ahead of geopolitical competitors. That’s a valuable asset worth treasuring, it indirectly suggested.

As the case moves forward, Judge Chhabria will have to decide whether to allow this “fair use by technical necessity” defense. Needless to say, this will be of vital importance to this and many other AI lawsuits, where the use of shadow libraries is at stake.

For now, the BitTorrent distribution claims remain the last live piece of a lawsuit filed in 2023. Whether Judge Chhabria will allow Meta’s new defense to proceed has yet to be seen.

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A copy of Meta’s supplemental interrogatory response is available here (pdf). The authors’ letter to Judge Chhabria can be found here (pdf). Meta’s response to that letter is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.