I’ve said it roughly a zillion times: trademark bullying exists because it works. One of the unfortunate inequities of our system is that having a large legal warchest simply allows someone to push around others over trademark “concerns” that aren’t valid. The formula for this is consistent. Large corporate interest with lawyers at the ready will police the country for any uses of a term in any way close to the corporation’s trademark, and C&D its victim into making a change, which itself only happens because the victim can’t afford to fight back. It sucks, but it’s reality.
But I’ll admit I didn’t expect the koozie people to have such a dirth of chill over this sort of thing. The Koozie Group is the company that holds the trademark for the word “koozie”, which I didn’t even know was a registered mark. I personally have always used the term generically to refer to a drink sleeve. Better Wheel Workshops makes drink sleeves out of wood and named its product “the woodzie”.
Better Wheel Workshops in Newfane produces wood can insulators previously known as “The Woodzie.” The husband and wife team made them for about a decade until the Koozie Group filed a petition to cancel the trademark.
The Chevaliers said they were informed about a year-and-a-half ago that Koozie Group, a large corporation based in Clearwater, Fla. that owns the trademark phrase “Koozie,” filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel “The Woodzie” trademark due to potential confusion.
Now, the couple is tentatively changing the name of the product to “Tree Sleeve.” The website, betterwheelvt.com, will stay and any mention of “The Woodzie” will be removed.
“We have until the end of the year for the full switchover,” Jeff said. “We’re notifying all wholesale partners of the change in the name and rebranding products in house.”
Now, there are a lot of other companies out there that are using the term “koozie” that have nothing to do with The Koozie Group. You can do a simple Google shopping search and find them. I would also argue that “The Woodsie” is a name and product type that is transformative enough that I have a hard time believing any real public confusion of association is likely. At a minimum, this sounds to me like a fight worth fighting, all else being equal.
But that’s the point: all else is not equal. Specifically, the ability to fight the fight monetarily is not equal.
Jeff said the dispute cost his family “a little in legal fees.”
“And by a little bit, I mean quite a lot actually, but it is what it is,” he said. “It’s the cost of doing business.”
Jeff said “The Woodzie” was trademarked in 2019 after being in use since 2015. The dispute with the Koozie Group began about a year-and-a-half ago. The family is working with a trademark attorney on the new name.
“We don’t want to go through the same thing all over again,” Jeff said, “so we’re really trying to scrub the world and make sure we’re not stepping on any toes.”
It’s just too bad we don’t have a better mechanism for the little guy to fight back on this sort of thing. I remain convinced that “koozie” and “woodzie” are distinct enough to prevent customer confusion. While “koozie” is somewhat creative and fanciful, it ultimately derives from “tea cozy” in Britain, making the leap to “woodzie” a trademark issue largely over the letters “i” and “e”.
Given that and the lack of policing of the mark elsewhere, this strikes me as a fight that The Koozie Group didn’t have to start. But it did and, because trademark bullying works, a smaller company did the math and found that caving was cheaper than fighting.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.The original has additional imagery which is worth checking out as well.
On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed.
By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.
In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.
Days later, on a remote patch of land in South Sudan, a 38-year-old man named Tor Top gathered with his neighbors outside the local health clinic. Surrounded by floodwaters, their hamlet of thatch and mud homes had been battling a massive outbreak of cholera, a deadly disease spread by poor sanitation. Around the country, it had infected 36,000 people in three months, killing more than 600, many of them babies. Top’s family lived in the epicenter.
The clinic, one of 12 in the area run by the Christian, Maryland-based humanitarian organization World Relief and funded by USAID, provided a key weapon in the fight: IV bags to stave off dehydration and death. The bags cost just 62 cents each, and in three months, the clinics had helped save more than 500 people.
Now, Top, who lived with his wife, children and mother in a one-room house less than 50 feet from the clinic, listened as World Relief staff shared grim news: The Trump administration had stopped USAID’s funding to World Relief. Their clinic, their lifeline, was closing.
Top’s usual gentle demeanor broke down. Why would the U.S. just cut off their medical care in the middle of a deadly outbreak?
By now the broad story of USAID’s ruin has been widely told: The decree handed down by Trump; Elon Musk, who led the new Department of Government Efficiency; and Russell Vought, who holds the purse strings for the administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, to scuttle the agency and undo decades of humanitarian work in the name of austerity. Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by promising to keep or restore critical lifesaving programs.
But that promise was not kept. Instead, a cast of Trump’s lesser-known political appointees and DOGE operatives cut programs in ways that guaranteed widespread harm and death in some of the world’s most desperate situations, according to an examination by ProPublica based on previously unreported episodes inside the government as well on-the-ground reporting in South Sudan. In some cases, they abandoned vital operations by clicking through a spreadsheet or ignoring requests in their inboxes.
The abrupt moves left aid workers and communities with no time to find other sources of funding, food or medicine. Borrowing from a phrase used to describe the U.S.’ overwhelming military campaign during the Iraq War, political appointee Tim Meisburger told senior USAID staff that the strategy was “shock and awe.” (Meisburger declined to comment.)
Tibor Nagy, a veteran diplomat who was Trump’s acting undersecretary of state for management until April, has long been a critic of the vast networks of nonprofit organizations funded by American taxpayers. But he told ProPublica the administration never cared to differentiate between the “fluff” and vital humanitarian programs. “It was the most harebrained operation I’d seen in my 38 years with the U.S. government,” Nagy said, referring to the methods used this year. “Who knows how much damage was done.”
In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all. Lewin blocked funding requests for programs like tuberculosis treatment in Tajikistan and emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, records show.
This meant that dozens of supposedly “active” operations were dormant throughout most of the year. Rubio’s advisers let other critical programs, which typically run on one-year grants, expire without renewing them.
Few places were hit harder than South Sudan, the youngest and poorest country in the world, as well as one of the most dependent on American aid.
After Trump’s inauguration, career USAID and State Department staff spent months warning top officials that the funding cuts would exacerbate a historic cholera epidemic ripping through the country. They needed less than $20 million to fund lifesaving health programs, including cholera response efforts, for three months at the beginning of the year — an eighth of what Trump recently approved to buy private jets for one cabinet secretary and just 3% of USAID’s budget in South Sudan last year. But Rubio, Marocco and Lewin failed to heed their own agencies’ assessments, according to internal records and interviews.
As a result, people in South Sudan died.
By denying and delaying those funds for months, Trump’s appointees incapacitated the fragile nation’s emergency response systems at the very moment when doctors and aid workers were scrambling to contain cholera’s spread. “We had to start rationing lifesaving interventions,” said Lanre Williams-Ayedun, the senior vice president of international programs for World Relief. “To have something like this happen in a place like this, where there aren’t mechanisms for backup, just means people are going to die.”
Villages and towns that had been reining in the outbreak suddenly lost essential services. Cholera came roaring back. “The trend was going down,” said a former U.S. official. “When we stopped the funding, it just surged.”
This summer, ProPublica journalists hiked and boated across Rubkona County, the epicenter of South Sudan’s outbreak and home to the country’s largest refugee camp, to interview families that the U.S. cut off from help. We collected medical files, diaries, meeting notes and photographs documenting cholera’s devastation after essential services stopped.
ProPublica also interviewed more than 100 government and aid officials and reviewed enormous caches of previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents from inside the Trump administration. Many were granted anonymity due to fears of reprisal.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official said fast, drastic changes to foreign aid were necessary to reform a “calcified system.” The world, especially U.S. interests, will be better for it in the long run, the official said, despite “some disruptions in the short term.”
The official also said that Rubio was the final decision-maker for all aid programs. They also contended that they had a limited budget to work with, “which required some tradeoffs on what programs to continue,” saying OMB has ultimate control over new humanitarian funds.
The official maintained that nobody died as a result of the funding cuts. “That’s a disgusting framing,” the official said. “There are people who are dying in horrible situations all around the world, all of the time.”
“Who is responsible for the suffering of the people of South Sudan?” the official added. “The South Sudanese [government leaders] who take their oil revenues and buy private jets and fancy watches and don’t see to their own people? Or the United States? Are we responsible for every poor person all around the world?”
Officially, the death count in South Sudan is nearly 1,600, making it the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history. But that toll is a dramatic undercount. ProPublica found newly dug, unmarked graves alongside roads and in backyards. In one town, community leaders showed reporters an informal cemetery with at least three dozen people who they said did not make it to medical facilities in time.
Tor Top’s mother, Nyarietna, was one of the uncounted. In March, the clinic doors had been padlocked for two weeks when she developed vomiting and diarrhea. Top bundled her into a rented canoe and began paddling toward the nearest hospital, eight hours away. Less than halfway into the journey, long after they had stopped reassuring one another that she would be OK, Nyarietna died.
Top turned the canoe around and made his way back home, where he buried his mom in their backyard. Now he alone tends the small garden where she grew corn and okra for their family. “If there was medicine here,” he said later, “maybe her life would have been saved.”
Aid to South Sudan
For years, Sudan’s Arab-led central government waged a campaign of brutal violence against its Christian minority in the south. Their persecution became a cause celebre of the American Evangelical movement, which convinced President George W. Bush’s administration to help broker a peace agreement that led to independence 15 years ago. Since then, the U.S. has given the fledgling nation nearly $10 billion in aid, according to federal data. That money subsidized virtually every corner of the health care system, among other institutions.
Still, South Sudan remains undeveloped. Political instability, corruption and dysfunction are rampant. The transitional government hasn’t paid public employees’ salaries for most of the last two years. U.S. officials had long been on alert to South Sudanese aid workers siphoning resources. Deadly political violence — left over from the civil war and threatening a new one — besets much of the country.
Well before Trump took office this year, the international community had broadly agreed that it was necessary to end the nation’s dependence on foreign aid, and U.S. officials were working on strategies to force its leaders to take responsibility for its citizens.
Some of the most vulnerable among them live in Rubkona County, an oil and cattle hub larger than Rhode Island near Sudan’s border. There, a refugee camp formed in 2014 during the nation’s civil war when thousands of people fled behind a United Nations peacekeeping mission to escape a massacre in the nearby town of Bentiu. As South Sudan’s political turmoil continued to spiral, tens of thousands more fled to the camp. In 2020, Rubkona was hit by a series of catastrophic floods that submerged the majority of the county. Generations of people are now essentially trapped there with nowhere else to go.
Previously, USAID gave the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration $36 million for work in South Sudan, which included keeping the Bentiu camp habitable and making critical repairs to the dikes that surround the camp and hold back the rising floodwaters. The group maintained the drainage system and paid people to pick up garbage and clean the latrines — essentially performing sanitation services for 110,000 people.
Despite those efforts, cholera began spreading late last year as new refugees poured in from neighboring Sudan. Rubkona County quickly became the outbreak’s epicenter. In a matter of days, hundreds of infections turned to thousands and the death toll mounted. U.S.-funded organizations raced to set up treatment units in the camp and surrounding communities.
The situation was dire, and people had few viable options to leave Bentiu, U.S. Ambassador Michael Adler reported back to Washington after USAID staff visited the camp to assess the outbreak in early December. The U.S.-funded cholera clinics and other programs were necessary given the “explosivity” of the illness’ spread, he wrote.
It was the kind of routine crisis response that USAID was renowned for handling. The last cholera outbreak in Rubkona, in 2022, lasted seven months, and government statistics say that just one person died while about 420 were sickened. An aggressive sanitation campaign, largely funded by the U.S., was crucial to containing the disease.
Now faced with a new outbreak, the embassy’s staff rushed to get the aid organizations in Rubkona more money, according to the organizations and former officials. By early January, humanitarians were preparing to expand operations. World Relief planned to expand its mobile clinics, Williams-Ayedun said. USAID told Solidarités International, which repaired water pipes, provided sanitation services and distributed soap, to aggressively spend the money it had to combat cholera, with the understanding that the agency would immediately review a proposal for more funds, according to two former officials. An additional $30 million for the U.N.’s migration office — which planned to use the money to continue maintaining the refugee camps — was already committed.
Then Trump took office, signing an executive order on day one to freeze all foreign aid pending a review of whether it aligned with the administration’s stated values.
It wasn’t true. Behind the scenes, Marocco and his lieutenants repeatedly obstructed USAID’s Africa, humanitarian aid and global health bureaus from restarting programs critical for responding to disease outbreaks, according to interviews and memos obtained by ProPublica. The money aid organizations in South Sudan were expecting by February didn’t come. Meanwhile, the appointees suspended nearly all of USAID’s staff, and those remaining said their bosses blocked payments even for approved programs.
Marocco was meant to be “the destroyer, and then someone else would come in to rebuild,” one former official said a senior political appointee had told her. “I guess the one thing happened, but not the other.” (Marocco did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The cuts were so frenetic that, for a brief time, the U.S. government stopped paying for the fuel that ran the electricity for the American embassy in Juba, including the security compound, just as violence was surging throughout South Sudan, according to former senior officials.
In response to questions about the episode in Juba, the senior State Department official denied it was a mistake or that Rubio’s review wasn’t careful. “Going back and looking at things again doesn’t mean that you’ve made a mistake,” the senior official said.
At one point in February, Marocco tried ordering the immediate return of foreign service officers stationed abroad. Several senior USAID officials protested, citing safety and logistical concerns for staff in war zones. During one meeting that month, Lewin responded, “You don’t want to get to know the lobsters. Just throw them in the pot,” according to an attendee and meeting notes.
Lewin joined the government via Musk’s DOGE and later took over for Marocco. He seldom came to the USAID office or met with his own staff experts, officials said. Publicly, he called the agency an “unaccountable independent institution” where secrets leak so quickly “we have to hand-walk memos around like we’re in the ’40s.”
In the weeks that followed, DOGE and Trump appointees forbade those who remained at USAID from communicating with aid groups and discouraged discussion internally, telling staff abroad not to approach ambassadors to advocate for programs, emails show.
Senior staffers said they were prohibited from meeting with congressional delegations to share basic information, which was critical to Congress’ oversight capabilities. The government’s health experts feared that taking any action to save lives could be a fireable offense.
Still, some spoke out.
“The consequences on lives lost and funding squandered will grow exponentially and irreversibly in many cases,” Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator at USAID, warned in a Feb. 8 email to agency leaders, including Joel Borkert, the chief of staff, and Meisburger, who led the humanitarian affairs bureau. They did not respond to his plea, and Enrich was later put on administrative leave.
Crucially, even when USAID’s new bosses did approve organizations to resume lifesaving work, they at times denied requests for the money that would allow them to do so, internal records show. Other proposals to fund existing grants or reverse terminations languished in limbo.
The official responding on behalf of the State Department said Trump’s OMB ultimately has more control over approving new grants and extensions, but that it was never the administration’s intention to keep all of the lifesaving programs forever.
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false, and the State Department did not address when Lewin sought funds from OMB for South Sudan’s cholera response.
In early February, embassy staff in South Sudan provided Adler, the ambassador, with a list of the most critical operations there, warning that funds had not been released and lifesaving programs would cease when their money ran out.
A career foreign service officer appointed to his post by the Biden administration, Adler had long been critical of the government of South Sudan for ongoing violence and deserting its own people, according to embassy cables and interviews with people familiar with his thinking.
Still, early on he appeared to recognize that without U.S. intervention, the most vulnerable people in the country did not stand a chance against cholera. In a Feb. 14 memo addressed to the leadership of the State Department’s Africa bureau, Adler asked the administration to release money to keep people alive.
“Lifesaving medicine and medical care, as well as emergency water and sanitation services, play a critical role in controlling disease outbreaks,” the embassy wrote, “notably a severe cholera outbreak in South Sudan’s border regions hosting the greatest number of refugees.”
Adler declined to meet with ProPublica in South Sudan and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Death by Spreadsheet
As humanitarian groups racked up unpaid bills, they began to file lawsuits challenging the foreign aid freeze. A federal judge ordered the administration to reimburse the organizations. But on Feb. 26, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the lower court’s order.
In a meeting with senior agency staff the next day, Lewin, who at that time was not yet in charge of USAID programs, indicated that he interpreted the recent legal decisions as a potential license to dispense with one of the key review processes for unfreezing operations, according to two attendees and meeting notes. One of those attendees took Lewin’s remarks to mean that “he had no intention to review contracts or implement lifesaving programs.”
In response, the senior State Department official told ProPublica, “No one meant that or said that.”
The next night, a Friday, staff at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, the division of USAID that dealt with emergencies and ran nearly all of the programs in South Sudan, were working late, scrambling to keep emergency programs operational. Suddenly, they noticed Borkert making changes to a key spreadsheet.
To create the spreadsheet, DOGE had sidestepped career staff, pulling information from databases made for project management. It was so rudimentary that it was often impossible to tell what a program did from descriptions as vague as “extension No. 4” or “allocation of funds,” according to people who saw the spreadsheet.
Rubio and his aides had already terminated hundreds of programs in preceding days. Staff were bracing for another round of cuts, but many of the line items remaining in the file were for programs that provided food, clean water or essential medicines.
Veteran USAID officials watched as Borkert scrolled down the spreadsheet, turning rows red, yellow or green every few seconds, never asking a single question. Realizing the red programs were slated to be cut, they frantically started editing descriptions so that Borkert would at least know what those programs did. Within minutes, he’d flagged dozens of them for termination. (Borkert declined to comment.)
A senior staff member in the group raced upstairs and begged Borkert to reinstate them, according to two officials familiar with the episode. He relented on several. But the next day, Marocco and Lewin told the group they’d kept far too many programs, emails show. Lewin ordered 151 additional awards terminated, writing that he would “have strong objections to these awards being turned on.” Marocco followed up by email at 11:30 p.m. saying the reactivations were “far too broad,” indicating several more line numbers and writing “sound like terminations,” next to them, ultimately canceling even more programs.
On March 10, Rubio announced on X that the review was over. In response to lawsuits, Trump officials told the courts that the review was a careful examination of USAID’s operations.
More than 5,000 programs had been canceled, and fewer than 1,000 remained — a figure that many officials told ProPublica was arbitrary but binding. In reality, the administration still wasn’t releasing money and many of the surviving programs had no funds, according to interviews with humanitarian groups and government officials, as well as memos and spreadsheets documenting those decisions.
When asked about the current status of the 1,000, the senior State Department official criticized USAID’s former vetting procedures and said the administration is in the process of creating new programs.
Soon after the review ended, the cholera response in South Sudan came crashing down.
“God Is With Us”
Rebecca Nyariaka and Koang Kai were shrouded in grief throughout the upheaval in Washington. Their only child, 4-year-old son Geer, had been one of the first victims when cholera inundated the Bentiu camp in December.
The couple met in secondary school at a refugee camp in Kenya and got married after they’d both returned to their homeland in 2013. After violence broke out, they fled to Bentiu, finding occasional jobs working with health clinics.
Now, in early March, they prodded one another to stay hopeful: 28-year-old Nyariaka was once again pregnant.
In the refugee camp, the couple could see the signs of the funding cuts everywhere. Uncollected garbage barricaded the drainage ditches that encased their neighborhood. Human waste spilled out of the overflowing communal latrines near Nyariaka’s house and into the fetid water filling the culverts. Toilets crawling with rats, maggots and flies became so noxious that neighbors began defecating on the surrounding dirt roads. The stench was overwhelming. “Those who washed the latrines have gone,” Kai said. “And we are left here all alone.”
The U.N.’s new sanitation contract had been committed before Trump took office, but it hadn’t received any money since last year. On March 12, USAID staff in the region sent Washington field notes about the conditions in the camp, where health services faced “closure or severe cutbacks” because of the funding shortfall. Officials at the organization pleaded behind the scenes as well. They repeatedly called and met with embassy leaders to request help, to no avail. “What we have now is survival of the fittest,” one U.N. official told ProPublica.
WhenNyariaka gave birth to a healthy baby boy, cholera was rampant throughout the camp. Neighbors were dying around them, and Kai was worried for his wife and new baby. “When cholera enters your home, you know the chances of survival are very low. Very few people survive it,” he said later.
Nyariaka named the baby Kuothethin, “God is with us.” In her first days back from the hospital, her body still healing, the new mom used the bathroom frequently, teetering back and forth to the overflowing latrines close to her house. She soon developed violent vomiting and diarrhea, the hallmark symptoms of cholera.
Kai, tall and muscular, picked her up in his arms and raced to the camp hospital, but it was too late. Nyariaka died just after they arrived.
She had been nowhere except her house and the latrines since coming home from the hospital, Kai said. He’s certain the toilets are to blame for her death. Depressed and unable to care for their newborn, he sent the baby across the floodwaters to live with his mother-in-law on another side of the state.
Kai and Nyariaka had been best friends for years before they started dating, their lives intertwined for nearly two decades. “Her whole way of life was good. She loved our children and cared for them,” Kai said. “I am heartbroken.”
As the disease ripped through the camp, more services shut down, including transportation for the dead. Kai’s neighbor, John Gai, lost his father to cholera. Gai had to take him to the cemetery himself in a wheelbarrow, his father’s head bobbing at his knees. “Nobody should have to carry a dead body among the living,” Gai said.
“Gross Neglect”
On March 28, Rubio notified Congress that he was officially shuttering most USAID operations and transferring programs that survived his review, including several in South Sudan, to the State Department.
Staffers spent the next weeks repeatedly appealing to Lewin — who by then had replaced Marocco as Rubio’s top foreign aid official — for authority to perform the mundane tasks needed to keep the programs operating. In late April, the agency’s humanitarian bureau submitted a blanket request to fund grants that Lewin had already approved. Lewin refused, records show, and the humanitarian bureau had to submit country-specific proposals for consideration. That process dragged on for months.
In June, just before USAID was shut down for good, Lewin finally approved some of the funding the staff had advocated for. But by then it was too late. The officials had run out of time to transfer money already appropriated by Congress to remaining programs.
On June 26, R. Clark Pearson, a supervisory contracting officer at USAID, sent a scathing email to USAID offices around the world in response to an email from the top procurement officer for the agency listing the hundreds of programs that were meant to be active. He said there was no one who could manage the awards, which he called “gross neglect on an astonishing level.”
“In a time of unimaginable hubris, gross incompetence and failures of leadership across the Agency, this has to be one of the most delusional emails I have seen to date,” Pearson wrote. “Lives depend on these awards and for the [U.S. government] to simply not manage them because of an arbitrary deadline is inexcusable.”
That same day, a senior humanitarian adviser informed Adler that payment extensions for several programs, with the exception of food aid, weren’t processed because the “approval was received late.”
In September, the Supreme Court issued another emergency ruling that let the administration withhold nearly $4 billion that Congress earmarked for foreign aid.
Later that month, OMB released some new foreign aid funds. That’s when World Relief finally began to receive funding, allowing the clinic in Tor Top’s community to reopen, even though the administration claimed the program had been “active” for almost seven months.
The U.N.’s migration program has not received a new South Sudan grant. The organization will run out of money for dike maintenance in Bentiu by February, after months of some of the most severe flooding in years.
A spokesperson for the U.N.’s migration program said the organization was still in discussion with the State Department and “continues to engage with donors about the critical humanitarian needs in South Sudan.”
The Uncounted
During the first months of the cholera outbreak, a mobile health team run by the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works in crisis zones around the world, visited Nyajime Duop’s remote village on the edges of Rubkona County twice weekly. The team brought soap and transported sick people to IRC’s nearby clinic for care.
At 27, Duop’s youthful face belied a life marked by war and poverty. She had arrived just a few months earlier, fleeing violence in Khartoum, Sudan, with an infant and toddler in tow, when Trump officials terminated IRC’s $5.5 million grant.
The IRC suspended its operations in the village in the spring. When Duop’s 1-year-old baby, Nyagoa, fell ill with cholera in July, on a day IRC would have visited, there was no one to help her. By the morning, Nyagoa was unconscious. She died that day, the Fourth of July.
Cholera has spread to nearly every corner of South Sudan, infected at least 100,000 people and killed 1,600, though cases began abating this fall. The true death toll is impossible to know, in part because clinics that would have cared for people and counted the dead were shuttered. The Trump administration also cut funding to the World Health Organization, which helped the South Sudanese government gather accurate data on the outbreak.
In a pasture a short walk from IRC’s clinic, ProPublica found at least three dozen mounds covered in sticks — the makeshift graves, village leaders said, of those who died of cholera before reaching the clinic. The clinic’s security guard told reporters he saw one man collapse and die just yards from the front gate.
“There are many more cases,” said Kray Ndong, then acting minister of health for the area, “many more deaths.”
The Trump administration recently announced a new era of foreign aid, where the U.S. will prioritize “trade over aid.” South Sudan, with a gross domestic product one-tenth the size of Vermont’s, has little to offer.
“The administration says they are committed to humanitarian needs,” one aid official in South Sudan said. “But we don’t know what that means, only that it will be transactional.”
In December 2025, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time ever, access to the major social media platforms was no longer guaranteed by interest, connection, or curiosity — but by a birth date. A new law in Australia decrees that people under 16 may no longer legally hold accounts on major social-media services. What began as parental warnings and optional “age checks” has transformed into something more fundamental: a formal re-engineering of the Internet’s social contract — one increasingly premised on the assumption that young people’s participation in networked spaces is presumptively risky rather than conditionally beneficial.
Australia’s law demands that big platforms block any user under 16 from having an account, or face fines nearing A$50 million. Platforms must take “reasonable steps” — and many will rely on ID checks, biometric checks, or algorithmic age verification rather than self-declared ages, which are easily falsified. The law was officially enforced in December 10, 2025, and by that date, major platforms are expected to have purged under-16 accounts or face consequences.
It’s not just Australia. Across the Atlantic, the European Parliament has proposed sweeping changes to the digital lives of minors across the European Commission’s domain. In late November 2025, MEPs voted overwhelmingly in favor of a non-binding resolution that would make 16 the default minimum age to access social media, video-sharing platforms and even AI-powered assistants — unless parental consent is given. Access for 13–15-year-olds would still be possible but only with consent.
The push is part of a broader EU effort. The Commission is working on a harmonised “age-verification blueprint app,” designed to let users prove they are old enough without revealing more personal data than necessary. The tool might become part of a future EU-wide “digital identity wallet.” Its aim: prevent minors from wandering into corners of the web designed without their safety in mind.
Several EU member states are already acting. Countries such as Denmark propose banning social media for under-15s unless parental consent is granted; others — including France, Spain and Greece — support an EU-wide “digital majority” threshold to shield minors from harmful content, addiction and privacy violations.
The harm narrative – and its limits
The effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain, and the underlying evidence is more mixed than public debate often suggests. Much of the current regulatory momentum reflects heightened concern about potential harms, informed by studies and reports indicating that some young people experience negative effects in some digital contexts — including anxiety, sleep disruption, cyberbullying, distorted self-image, and attention difficulties. These findings are important, but they do not point to uniform or inevitable outcomes. Across the research, effects vary widely by individual, platform, feature, intensity of use, and social context, with many young people reporting neutral or even positive experiences. The strongest evidence, taken as a whole, does not support the claim that social media is inherently harmful to children; rather, it points to clustered risks associated with specific combinations of vulnerability, design, and use.
European lawmakers point to studies indicating that one in four minors displays “problematic” or “dysfunctional” smartphone use. But framing these findings as proof of universal addiction risks collapsing a complex behavioral spectrum into a single moral diagnosis — one that may obscure more than it clarifies.
From the outside, the rationale feels compelling: we would never leave 13-year-olds unattended in a bar or a casino, so why leave them alone in an attention economy designed to capture and exploit their vulnerabilities? Yet this comparison quietly imports an assumption — that social media is analogous to inherently harmful adult-only environments — rather than to infrastructure whose effects depend heavily on design, governance, norms, and support.
What gets lost when we generalize harm
When harm is treated as universal, the response almost inevitably becomes universal exclusion. Nuance collapses. Differences between children — in temperament, resilience, social context, family support, identity, and need — are flattened into a single risk profile.
The Internet, however, was never meant to serve a single type of user. Its power came from universality — from its ability to give voice to the otherwise voiceless: shy kids, marginalized youth, LGBTQ+ children, rural teenagers, creative outsiders, identity seekers, those who feel alone. For many young people, social media platforms are not simply entertainment. They are places of learning, authorship, peer support, political awakening, and cultural participation. They are where teens practice argument, humor, creativity, solidarity, dissent — often more freely than in offline institutions that are tightly supervised, hierarchical, or unwelcoming.
When policymakers speak about children online primarily through the language of damage, they risk erasing these positive and formative uses. The child becomes framed not as an emerging citizen, but as a passive object of protection — someone to be shielded rather than supported, managed rather than empowered.
This framing matters because it shapes solutions. If social media is assumed to be broadly toxic, then the only responsible response appears to be removal. But if harm is uneven and situational, then exclusion becomes a blunt instrument — one that protects some children while actively disadvantaging others.
Marginalized and vulnerable youth are often the first to feel this loss. LGBTQ+ teens, for example, disproportionately report finding affirmation, language, and community online long before they encounter it offline. Young people in rural areas or restrictive households rely on digital spaces for exposure to ideas, mentors, and peers they cannot access locally. For these users, access is not a luxury — it is infrastructure.
Generalized harm narratives also obscure agency. They imply that young people are uniquely incapable of learning norms, developing judgment, or negotiating risk online — despite doing so, imperfectly but meaningfully, in every other social domain. This assumption can become self-fulfilling: if teens are denied the chance to practice digital citizenship, they are less prepared when access finally arrives. Treating youth presence online as a problem to be solved — rather than a reality to be shaped — risks turning protection into erasure. When the gate is slammed shut, a lot more than TikTok updates are lost: skills, social ties, civic voice, cultural fluency, and the slow, necessary process of learning how to exist in public.
As these policies spread from Australia to Europe — and potentially beyond — we face a world in which digital citizenship is awarded not by curiosity or contribution, but by age and identity verification. The Internet shifts from a public square to a credential-gated club.
Three futures for a youth-shaped Internet
What might this reshape look like in practice? There are three broad futures that could emerge, depending on how regulators, platforms and civil society act.
1. The Hard-Gate Era
In the first future, exclusion becomes the primary safety mechanism. More countries adopt strict minimum-age laws. Platforms build age-verification gates based on government IDs or biometric systems. This model treats youth access itself as the hazard — rather than interrogating which platform designs, incentive structures, and governance failures generate harm.
The social cost is high. Marginalized young people may lose access to vital communities and the Internet becomes something young people consume only after permission — not something they help shape.
2. The Hybrid Redesign Era
In a second future, regulatory pressure triggers transformation rather than exclusion. Age gates are narrow and specific. Platforms are forced to redesign for youth safety. Crucially, this approach assumes that harm is contingent, not inherent — and therefore preventable through design.
Infinite scroll and autoplay may be disabled by default for minors. Algorithmic amplification might be limited or made transparent. Data harvesting and targeted advertising curtailed. Privacy defaults strengthened. Friction added where needed.
Here, minors remain participants in the public sphere — but within environments engineered to reduce exploitation rather than maximize engagement at any cost.
3. The Parallel Internet Era
In the third future, bans fail to eliminate demand. Underage users migrate to obscure platforms beyond regulatory reach. This outcome highlights a central flaw in the “inherent harm” narrative: when access is blocked rather than improved, risk does not disappear — it relocates.
The harder question
There is real urgency behind these debates. Some children are struggling online. Some platform practices are demonstrably irresponsible. Some business models reward excess and compulsion. But if our response treats social media itself as the toxin — rather than asking who is harmed, how, and under what conditions — we risk replacing nuanced care with blunt control.
A digital childhood can be safer without being silent, protected without being excluded and, supported without being stripped of voice.
The question is not whether children should be online. It is whether we are willing to do the harder work: redesigning systems, reshaping incentives, and offering targeted support — instead of declaring an entire generation too fragile for the public square.
Konstantinos Komaitis is Resident Senior Fellow, Democracy and Tech Initiative, Atlantic Council
Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state’s congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia.
This is only part of Trump’s recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
That was delivered via Trump’s favorite outlet for his unhinged rants, Truth Social. He followed that up by making these statements where anyone could hear them during a press briefing:
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
That put another target on Minnesota’s back. The state is home to nearly a third of the nation’s 260,000 Somalians. It’s not as though they’re here illegally, though.
Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S., and 87 percent of those born elsewhere are naturalized citizens.
Not that any of that matters to Donald Trump or ICE’s collective of masked thugs. So, these are the sort of things that are happening now in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as Trump’s hatred becomes personified.
Federal agents used chemical irritants to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown targeting the community.
City Council member Jamal Osman, a Somali American who represents the neighborhood, witnessed the confrontation, as did an Associated Press videographer.
[…]
He also said he spoke with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, detained and taken to an ICE detention center. There, officials finally looked at his U.S. passport, fingerprinted him, and released him but told him to find his own way home, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away in snowy weather.
The DHS also made some noise about an arrest that supposedly justified the violent actions taken by ICE officers (who not only deployed chemicals but also arrested two people who were simply recording ICE officers and/or asserting their Fourth Amendment rights). But the statement seems extremely light on facts, as is often the case when DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin decides to open her mouth:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Jesus Saucedo-Portillo, whom she described as an unauthorized immigrant, on Dec. 6 while he was getting into his vehicle in a campus parking lot.
In a divergence from what school officials have said about the incident, McLaughlin said officers had a warrant and were obstructed by a university administrator and campus security during the encounter.
McLaughlin said Saucedo-Portillo “is a registered sex offender and has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.” A search of Minnesota court records by the Minnesota Star Tribune found no record of a DWI case under that name, and Saucedo-Portillo does not appear in the national sex-offender registry.
Some journalists who got an inside look at this operation could have tried to undercut McLaughlin’s narrative about targeted arrests and “worst of the worst.” Instead, NBC News embedded with ICE for a day and ended up generating an article headlined “ICE operation shows the difficulty of immigration arrests amid pushback in frigid Minnesota.”
The article isn’t nearly as bad as the headline, but it allows ICE and their spokespeople to flat out lie about what’s been happening all over this nation, but has most recently focused almost exclusively on cities or states run by members of the Democratic Party.
“It is not an operation targeting the Somali community,” [ICE Acting Executive Director Marcos] Charles said. “We’re looking for people that are here illegally.”
Right. And that’s why the raid that made all the headlines (and generated a handful of bullshit arrests) just happened to have occurred in a neighborhood that is primarily populated by Somalis.
Then there’s this, which is directly contradicted by NBC’s reporting, even if NBC tries to present its observations as supporting Marcos Charles’s assertion:
“The biggest misconception is that we’re out there just randomly arresting people, which we’re not,” Charles said.
[…]
During NBC News’ roughly eight hours with ICE, fewer than a dozen people were arrested despite not being the initial targets of the operation. They just happened to be at the scene when agents showed up.
Given the wording, I would assume eleven people who weren’t ICE targets were arrested. If it were less than that, I assume NBC would have used wording like “ten people” or “less than ten people.” Either way, it’s like more than one “collateral” arrest per hour, which is crazy considering this is an article involving officers griping about the cold keeping people indoors, being prevented from entering homes by property owners multiple times due to the ICE’s lack of actual judicial warrants, and double-tap home search that revealed the targeted person had already fled. The officers decided to arrest the other person there just because.
Minneapolis is pushing back, which is exactly the way it should be. Here’s an incredible recording of anti-ICE protesters shielding a Minneapolis store from being entered by ICE officers, who collectively can’t even explain why they need to enter the building. The officers are eventually shamed into leaving, and showered with nothing but expressions of love, sympathy, and offers of prayer:
Resistance works. ICE officers work best when there’s no friction. When confronted or slowed, they’re far more apt to give up and leave than continue their likely illegal actions. In some cases, being confronted results in unprovoked acts of violence by federal officers. Fortunately, nothing like that happened here.
And just because we’re talking about Minneapolis, “Minnesota Nice,” and ICE activity largely fueled by xenophobic hate, here’s a palate cleanser. I don’t agree with my dad on nearly anything political, but he’s one of the most helpful people you will ever meet. He recently made the news in Minneapolis for doing what he’s always done: pitching in wherever needed.
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Yesterday, Rep. Harriet Hageman released her bill to repeal Section 230. She’s calling it “reform,” but make no mistake—it’s a repeal, and I’ll explain why below. The law turns 30 in February, and there’s a very real chance this could be its last anniversary.
Which is why we’re running BestNetTech’s fundraising campaign right now, offering our very first commemorative coin for donations of at least $100 made before January 5th. That coin celebrates those 30 years of Section 230. But more importantly, your support funds the kind of coverage that can actually cut through the bullshit at a moment when it matters most.
Because here’s the thing: for nearly three decades, we’ve been one of the only sources to report fully and accurately on both how Section 230 works and why it’s so important. And right now, with a bipartisan coalition gunning to kill it based on myths and misinformation, that expertise is desperately needed.
Section 230 remains one of the most misunderstood laws in America, even among the people in Congress trying to destroy it. Some of that confusion is deliberate—political expediency wrapped in talking points. But much of it has calcified into “common knowledge” that’s actively wrong. The “platform or publisher” distinction that doesn’t exist in the law. The idea that 230 protects illegal content. The claim that moderation choices forfeit your protections. All myths. All dangerous. All getting repeated by people who should know better.
So below, I’m highlighting some of our essential Section 230 coverage—not as a greatest hits compilation, but as a roadmap to understanding what’s actually at stake. If you believe in the open internet, you need Section 230. And if you need Section 230, you need someone who actually understands it fighting back against the tsunami of bullshit. That’s what you’re funding when you support BestNetTech.
Let’s start with the big one. Our most popular post ever on Section 230:
Five years later, this is still the single most useful thing you can hand someone who’s confidently wrong about Section 230. It systematically demolishes every major myth—the platform/publisher nonsense, the “neutrality” requirement that doesn’t exist, the “good faith” clause people misread, all of it—in a format designed to be shared. And people do share it, constantly, because the same wrong arguments keep recycling. Consider this your foundation.
This is the piece that exposes the semantic game. Politicians love to say they’re not repealing 230, just “reforming” it. But as Cathy Gellis explains, nearly every reform proposal accomplishes the same thing: it forces websites into expensive, extended litigation to reach an outcome the law currently reaches in weeks. That’s not reform—it’s sabotage by procedure. The real benefit of 230 isn’t the outcome (most of these cases would eventually win on First Amendment grounds anyway), it’s that you get there for $100k instead of $5 million. Strip that away and you’ve effectively repealed the law for everyone except the richest companies. Which, spoiler alert, is exactly the point of most “reform” proposals.
A near universal trait of those who show up with some crazy idea to “reform” Section 230 is that they don’t understand how the law works, despite the many explainers out there (and an entire book by Jeff Kosseff). And that’s why, as with Cathy’s article above, the advocates for reform lean in on the claim that they’re just “reforming” it when they’re actually leading to an effective repeal.
Law professor James Boyle asks the more interesting question: why do smart people keep getting this so catastrophically wrong? His answer—cognitive biases, analogies to other areas of law that don’t actually apply, and the sheer difficulty of thinking clearly about speech policy—explains why the same bad ideas keep resurfacing despite being debunked repeatedly. Understanding the psychology of the confusion is almost as important as correcting it.
So many complaints about Section 230 are actually complaints about the First Amendment in disguise. People angry that a website won’t remove certain speech often blame 230, but the reality is that the First Amendment likely protects that speech anyway. Prof. Jess Miers explains why killing 230 won’t magically enable the censorship people want—it’ll just make the process more expensive and unpredictable. Some people hear that and think “great, we can rely on the First Amendment alone then!” Which brings us to:
This is the piece that clicks it all into place. Prof. Eric Goldman’s paper explains that 230 isn’t an alternative to First Amendment protection—it’s a procedural shortcut to the same outcome. Without 230, most of these lawsuits would still eventually fail on First Amendment grounds. The difference is it would cost $3-5 million in legal fees to get there instead of $100k. That $100k vs $5 million gap is the difference between an ecosystem where small companies can exist and one where only giants survive. Anyone telling you we can just rely on the First Amendment either doesn’t understand this or is deliberately trying to consolidate the internet into a handful of megacorps.
And now we get to the part where even the supposed experts fuck it up. The NY Times—the Paper of Record—has made the same basic factual error about Section 230 so many times they’ve had to run variations of this correction repeatedly:
If it feels like you can’t trust the mainstream media to accurately report on Section 230, you’re not wrong. And that’s why we do what we do at BestNetTech.
Even the tech press—outlets that should know better—regularly faceplants on this stuff. This Wired piece was so aggressively wrong it read like parody. The value here is watching us dissect not just the errors, but how someone can write thousands of words about a law while fundamentally misunderstanding what it does.
The title says it all. When former members of Congress—people who theoretically understand how laws work—produce something this catastrophically wrong, it reveals the scope of the problem. These aren’t random trolls; these are people with institutional credibility writing op-eds that influence policy. The danger here is that their ignorance carries weight.
The pattern is almost comical: someone decides 230 is bad, spends zero time understanding it, then announces a “solution” that would either accomplish nothing or catastrophically backfire. This piece is representative of dozens we’ve written, each time responding to a new flavor of the same fundamental confusion, like no other publication online.
People have assigned Section 230 almost mystical properties—that it’s the reason democracy is failing, or that repealing it would somehow fix polarization, or radicalization, or misinformation. The law does none of these things, good or bad. This piece dismantles the fantasy thinking that treats 230 like a magic wand.
Amid all the doom-saying, it’s worth remembering what 230 actually enables. Jess Miers walks through five specific cases where the law protected communities, support groups, review sites, and services that improve people’s lives. Repealing 230 doesn’t just hurt Facebook—it destroys the ecosystem of smaller communities that depend on user-generated content.
Please support our continued reporting on Section 230
There are dozens more pieces in our archives, each responding to new variations of the same fundamental misunderstandings. We’ve been doing this for nearly three decades—long before it was politically fashionable to attack 230, and we’ll keep doing it as long as the law is under threat.
Because here’s what happens if we lose this fight: the internet consolidates into a handful of platforms big enough to survive the legal costs. Smaller communities die. Innovation gets strangled in the crib. And ironically, the problems people blame on 230—misinformation, radicalization, abuse—all get worse, because only the giants with the resources to over-moderate will survive, and they’ll moderate in whatever way keeps advertisers and governments happy, not in whatever way actually serves users.
That’s the stakes. Not whether Facebook thrives, but whether the next generation of internet services can even exist.
We’re committed to making sure policymakers, journalists, and anyone who cares about this stuff actually understand what they’re about to destroy. But we need support to keep doing it. If you agree that Section 230 matters, and that someone needs to keep telling the truth about it when even the NY Times can’t get basic facts right, support BestNetTech today. Consider a $230 donation and get our first commemorative coin, celebrating 30 years of a law that’s under existential threat and making sure it survives to see 31.
We’ve noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper). This is billions of taxpayer dollars being paid to billionaires in exchange for doing nothing differently.
Republicans are framing this as something that’s going to save taxpayers money, but it’s a lie.
At up to $120 a month for a “real” plan at next-generation speeds, plus hundreds of dollars in up front hardware fees, the service is too expensive for most of the Americans desperate to be connected. Apparently aware of the criticism that taxpayers were giving billions of dollars to a billionaire for a system many people can’t afford, Starlink briefly introduced a slower, $40 monthly tier.
“The 100Mbps plan was not widely available, as it seemed to pop up in a relatively small number of areas where Starlink likely had excess network capacity. Some customers speculate that new users and existing subscribers scrambled to take advantage of the bargain deal, which caused Starlink to reach capacity in the eligible areas. The plan stood out for its low price while capping download speeds to 100Mbps.”
Starlink also imposes massive “congestion fees” in areas where it lacks capacity. These fees can be upwards of $750 in some areas. So again, you can probably see why it’s a bad idea for Republicans to treat Starlink as a connectivity panacea while showering it with subsidies that could be going to better, more affordable, higher capacity options.
Ideally, if you’re going to throw billions of subsidies at U.S. broadband, your technology priority should be fiber (preferably open access, community owned to counter monopoly dominance), wireless (either fixed or 5G), and then LEO satellite to fill in the gaps. Instead, Republicans are putting Starlink at the front of the line, and Musk and friends are whining about and harassing states that balk at this dumb idea.
Back in June, researchers showed in detail that given the limited nature of satellite physics, the more people that use Starlink, the slower the network is going to get. What, exactly, do folks think is going to happen when the network sees a mass infusion of taxpayer subsidized advertisement and usage?
To be clear: Starlink is great if you have no other options and can afford it. But it shouldn’t be the top priority in a historic round of taxpayer subsidies. That’s just begging for trouble down the road. But Republicans are so excited to throw billions of new dollars at their white supremacist billionaire godbaby, they don’t really care about the actual real world impact at the other end of the line.
