Mike Masnick

It's October the 1st, 2026, and this week we're talking about platform readiness for next week's Brazil elections, Trump's much heralded AI accord, and for our extended Patreon episode, a potential turning point for terrorism content on the internet.

Controlled speech is the highly electable face of Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Tector, and me, Ben Whitelaw.

But as you heard from our opening, Mike is away this week, and we're joined by the brilliant Katie Harberth.

Katie, welcome to the podcast.

There's like really awesome technologies that are in place.

I think, for example, the whole idea of Mike Masnick around protocol before platform is a really interesting conversation where we have silo based platform oriented conversations in Facebook and on TikTok.

But we can't communicate.

I can't send a message from TikTok to Facebook, but I can do that on email because it's a protocol.

So, Mike, what fun thing did you see on the Internet this week?

So this one, usually our fun things are kind of, you know, random, silly fun things.

This one actually might be somewhat relevant to people who listen to this podcast, which is this new AI system called Jev from this company called TypeSafe, which has just become all the rage among people playing with AI tools this week.

Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet.

It's September 24th, 2026, and this week we're making sense of the New York noise about AI regulation, highlighting three ways that internet users are embarking on governance, and for our extended Patreon episode, what recent stories about Discord and ALO say about the state of age assurance right now.

Control Alt Speech is the highly effective age-appropriate musings... of Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Tector, and me, Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.

I think most of what we say is 18 plus.

Are we checking IDs at the doorbell? Do we need a bouncer? We're going to have to hire a bouncer to check IDs before you listen to this podcast.

Mike, I'm excited to tell you what my fun thing this week is on Controllable Speech.

I'm always struggling for ideas, basically, for this opening, cold opening.

There's so much

But it's all public data.

Yeah, that's not fun.

You've misread the brief, Mike.

There's an element to it that is fun because it's like, oh my gosh, look at this.

This is kind of cool that you can look at that on your computer.

Mike, it's important to remember that large parts of the internet are wonderful.

We can't lose sight of that.

And there's a shrinking amount of the internet.

It's September the 10th, 2026, and this week we're talking about Australia going after algorithmic feeds, the big AI safety story everyone's talking about, and for our extended Patreon episode, the domain takedown story that's actually flying under the radar.

Control Alt Speech is the always linear, never algorithmically sorted podcast.

co-hosted by Mike Bassnett, founder and editor of TechDirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.

Mike, do you think we should be creating a list of our tools for people to follow?

Oh, I wonder if there's something in that.