Kate Ruane

👇🏻

I wanted to share probably the most important sermon I’ve given and it’s while I’m being arrested. It’s torture pure and simple what happens at #Broadview. I’m ok, though I was thrown to the ground and choked with my pectoral cross. A review of the video shows I was peaceful - did I deserve this?

Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...

“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards." - @kateruane.bsky.social www.404media.co/google-has-c...

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The Future of Speech Online Conference starts tomorrow! Join us and many incredible experts to talk about jawboning, the First Amendment, and government efforts to shape private speech. @cdt.org
standtogether.swoogo.com/foso25/9611110

Unions are trying to stop Trump from kicking out immigrants over social media posts The State Department recently said it revoked visas for immigrants who criticized Charlie Kirk after his death.

“If we’re a country that values free speech, ​​then we should value it for everyone who’s here,” Cope says. “Otherwise, it doesn’t really mean very much.”

www.theverge.com/policy/80111...

What “Domestic Terrorism” and Non-Citizen Speech Have in Common The Fight Must Continuestic-terrorism">The Common Thread Between Non-Citizen Speech and “Domestic Terrorism”hor">A Victory for Non-Citizen Speech ation to people in the United States through coercion,...

Are people wearing inflatable frog costumes doing the Cha Cha Slide as part of protests outside of ICE detention centers in Portland "domestic terrorists"? Of course not.
cdt.org/insights/wha...

Keeping information reliable in the digital age: Lessons from Wikipedia A new series explores how Wikipedia can inspire new standards of knowledge integrity for our times

A gentle reminder that Wikipedia is a global treasure and that if you dislike what you see on there the door is open to you to contribute to the community.
Radical transparency and cooperation is how Wikipedia works:
medium.com/freely-shari...

2025 Tech Prom Join us on October 23, 2025, at The LINE DC for this year’s Tech Prom! 🎟️ [ Reserve Your Seat ]   |   🏛️ [ Sponsor the Event ] At the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), we fight to advance civil...

#TechPromCDT is back this October! It’s a night of connection, conversation, and celebration of 30+ years of tech policy. Can’t wait to see this incredible community come together again.
Oct 23 | 📍 The LINE DC
@CDT.org
cdt.org/event/2025-t...

Federal Funding and the First Amendment

A series of short posts from leading scholars about the constraints the First Amendment imposes on the government's authority to impose conditions on federal funding. Seems relevant! This is a @knightcolumbia.org series from earlier this year. knightcolumbia.org/research/fed...

Craig Shirley, a presidential historian and biographer of President Ronald Reagan, said Mr. Trump's experience was so searing that he did not believe the president would improperly restrain others' free speech, whatever his public exhortations. "We all especially know Biden used government to censor Trump, kicking him off many media platforms, a clear violation of the law," Mr. Shirley said. "As his own First Amendment rights were abridged, my guess is he's especially sensitive to anyone else seeing their First Amendment rights taken away."

It says something about Trump’s all-out war on free speech that the New York Times couldn’t find a more credible person than “presidential historian” Craig Shirley to defend it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/u...

Go Birds.

Our own study of multilingual AI finds that these systems are trained on mostly English-lang data, machine translated speech, or data scraped from the web which doesn't represent how people speak. Translation is an art form. AI is creating six-fingered mimicry of language: cdt.org/insights/los...

I have lost all patience with the apparently unshakeable conviction that striking a reasonable, moderate pose means assuming the sincerity of transparently pretextual horseshit. Donald Trump does not care about reducing crime in DC. He is testing and normalizing paramilitary deployments in cities.

This.

I was honored to join this conversation with @knightcolumbia.org about federal funding the the First Amendment and to write this piece, in which I ask, what if Congress decided to exercise its power in this moment to protect our First Amendment rights?

YouTube video by Evan Greer Pink Pony Club but it's about ... encryption?

I want #40MoreYearsofEvanGreer giving us essential security lesson via pop song covers! We sing this one in my house constantly. @evangreer.bsky.social

youtu.be/EJW7v_Emw8k?...

House Passes Bill to Ban Sharing of Revenge Porn, Sending It to Trump The Take It Down Act, which united a coalition of conservative and liberal lawmakers, criminalizes the nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit images of others and requires companies to remove them.

CDT’s @beccabranum.bsky.social in the @nytimes.com on the unconstitutionality of the TAKE IT DOWN Act that recently passed in the House this Monday. www.nytimes.com/2025...

Much more than six times

Imagine seeing the Venus de Milo for the first time and thinking “filth.” How broken and sad.

Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia Wikipedia is facing another threat.

Wikipedia is the ground truth of the internet. It has over 260000 dedicated people engaged in radically transparent content moderation and that’s why it’s the last best thing on the Internet. Targeting it says more about the one doing the targeting. www.theverge.com/news/656720/...

Leading us off, CDT CEO @alexreevegivens.bsky.social: “We’re convening this event because the U.S. is facing a crisis moment for the future of free speech."

Join CDT for this important discussion tomorrow!

A bop.

I think Mel Brooks once said something like: Tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die. By extension, "censorship" is when I can't use racial slurs on a private social media platform; "free speech" is when you get abducted off the street for political opinions.

Inside the DHS task force scouring foreign students' social media A critic called the review a return to “McCarthyism,” a reference to tactics used to identify alleged communists during the Cold War.

From CDT’s @kateruane.bsky.social: “Automated tools are error-prone & guaranteed to improperly categorize an unknown number of applicants’ viewpoints as violent, terroristic, or antisemitic, even by the Administration’s broad definitions of those terms.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

From CDT’s @kateruane.bsky.social: “DHS is targeting people based on nothing more than their First Amendment-protected expression, which is wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, it will almost certainly use error-prone automated tools to detect disfavored speech.” bsky.app/profile/npr....

Just me banging on again that BROADWAY employs more people than coal.

It’s also lazy. It doesn’t actually take that long to understand how social media can benefit kids and everyone. Or how censorship is bad and anti-democratic!! ::Gestures wildly at everything::

I mean… who among us