Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the internet.

The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and along with it came a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people missed entirely. Two football fans—one in Illinois, one in California—sued the NFL under the Sherman Act, claiming the league violated antitrust law by barring its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams—the Bears and the now-champion Seahawks—on the platform they actually use, rather than on Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.

The fans couldn’t demonstrate a concrete injury—the information they wanted was still available, for free, on X. As the court put it, their grievance reduced to being “denied the ability to obtain real-time NFL team information on a private platform with which they are ideologically comfortable.” And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrain trade and harm competition—not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve called out attempts to force social media platforms to carry content they don’t want to carry.

But the fact that the NFL is legally allowed to be this myopic doesn’t make it a smart business decision. You can be entirely within your rights and still be making a spectacularly bad call.

Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal lets X publish real-time highlights, and in return the league gets… money, presumably. As the court noted in its ruling:

Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” It allows X to publish real-time highlights from football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters post on X with news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on X discuss teams’ acquisitions of free agents and other roster changes. For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event in which teams select eligible players to join their rosters), X published more than one million posts concerning the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly renewed its partnership with X. Fans do not pay money to receive NFL news on X.

Fine. Lots of organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification to tell its own teams they couldn’t even exist on a competing platform. Multiple NFL teams—including the New England Patriots—had set up accounts on Bluesky, started posting, and were building audiences. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut it all down.

From the ruling:

Initially, multiple NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….

As alleged, however, the NFL later instructed its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But for this instruction, at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky. The Patriots’ vice president of content, Fred Kirsch, for example, has stated: “Whenever the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll get back on Bluesky.”

Yes, the (Super Bowl-losing) Patriots’ VP of content is publicly saying his team wants to be on Bluesky and is just waiting for the league to let them. This wasn’t a case of teams being uninterested. Teams saw the audience there, set up shop, and were actively communicating with fans—and the NFL made them stop.

As Front Office Sports reported at the time, the league specifically told the Patriots to take down their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads—Meta’s X competitor—for team real-time updates either.

So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates that fans actually care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked out.

This is “broadcast-brain” thinking applied to the internet, and it’s spectacularly dumb.

The NFL is treating social media platforms the way it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes a certain kind of sense—there’s a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But social media doesn’t work that way. There’s no scarcity. Posting an injury report on Bluesky doesn’t remove it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The entire point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.

And the audience, increasingly, is on Bluesky. As Mashable noted last year heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already hit a kind of critical mass:

You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that folks like Kimes and a large portion of the NFL writers at popular sports sites like The Ringer made Bluesky home. And last season it felt like Bluesky hit terminal velocity, where enough people joined that you could fully exit to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, the shitposters naturally came along, too. Because that’s where the discussion was happening. There is genuine, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from, say, weird ads or angry reply guys you might find on X.

That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans that the NFL should be desperate to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “ball knowers.” They’ve moved to Bluesky because, well, X kind of sucks now for following sports. As Mashable also noted:

Bluesky does have a leg-up in some areas — Elon Musk’s site recently has proven unreliable for NFL fans. The site crashed the morning free agency launched, which is one of the most important days for NFL social media. And the sports tab — which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days — degraded into near uselessness years ago. And, in general, X has morphed with Musk’s image, which is focused more on AI and politics — not things like following football. Of course you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does involve wading through more junk than it used to. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that regard.

So the most engaged, most knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all of this is… to ban its teams from showing up.

It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade)—punishing your most dedicated fans because of some deal you cut with a middleman in an effort to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.

Meanwhile, the platform the NFL is propping up with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who tuned in for the Super Bowl halftime show got to watch a significant chunk of the X user base have a full-blown racist meltdown over Bad Bunny performing. The NFL specifically chose Bad Bunny to appeal to a broader, more global audience—and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were on Bluesky where there was an overwhelming wave of support for the performance. The league is betting its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy gets shouted down, while blocking teams from the one where those new fans are actually showing up.

This kind of control-freakery from the NFL shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has spent decades aggressively lying to bars, restaurants, and small businesses about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you can’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an ad without a license—something that has never actually been true.

The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything, from what a church can call its viewing party to which social media apps their teams are permitted to use.

The problem is that control-based thinking only works when you actually can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can control which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You cannot control where fans choose to talk about football on the internet. The conversation is going to happen whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the league’s teams get to participate in it.

Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should be finding fans where they are, not herding them onto a single platform because you cut an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known for being a hellscape of AI slop, political rage, and engagement-bait, while the platform you’re blocking your teams from is the one where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.

The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s stuck in a 2005 mindset. That’s not how any of this works anymore.

Someone at NFL HQ needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart play is to let them go.

If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.

And yet, here we are.

Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.

The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details:

The authors of the report state that using Palantir’s software would increase dependence on a U.S. provider. It also poses the risk of losing data sovereignty and thereby national sovereignty.

Above all, however, the army’s staff experts say it remains unclear who has access to data shared with Palantir. The following sentence from the Swiss Army report is particularly relevant: “Palantir is a U.S.-based company, which means there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”

As if it’s any sort of surprise that European governments are wary of betting on US tech companies with close ties to the US government. It’s not like reports of US spies co-opting US tech companies for surveillance efforts haven’t been front page news over the past twenty years. And now, this administration—with its willingness to antagonize everyone in Europe, and its close ties to Palantir and Thiel? It’s no freaking wonder that the Swiss government was like “yo, maybe pass.”

So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?

By suing the journalists, of course.

But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.

According to the FT:

Palantir’s lawsuit, filed in January, is not seeking damages or making libel claims against Republik, but instead alleges that the company was not given sufficient right to reply under Swiss media law. The company objects to Republik’s presentation of the public documents and believes its right to reply has been wrongfully denied.

….

Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reporting, she said, adding that the magazine stands by its reporting.

To which I say: good. Because Palantir’s demand here is absurd. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the big defense contractor didn’t like the coverage? Pull on your big boy pants and get over it. Switzerland’s right of reply law exists so people can correct factual errors, not so corporations can force publications to run PR copy because they didn’t like the tone of accurate, document-based reporting.

And it’s worth noting: Palantir has already used other avenues to respond. The company published a blog post complaining that the Republik article “paints a false and misleading picture” and “hinders important discussions about the modernization of European software.” They’ve got the platform. If Palantir wants to push back on the story, they have many methods of doing so. Hell, they can do so on X any time they want—on what Musk and company like to call the global town square for free speech.

But that’s apparently not enough. Instead, a multibillion-dollar American defense and intelligence contractor is hauling a small independent Swiss magazine into court, not because anything the magazine published was wrong, but because Palantir wants to force the publication to run its talking points under legal compulsion.

Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir.

The European Federation of Journalists has called this exactly what it is: a SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the weight and cost of litigation to intimidate and punish journalists for doing their jobs.

“The investigation conducted by WAV and Republik into Palantir is largely based on official documents that journalists were able to access thanks to Swiss freedom of information law,” notes EFJ President Maja Sever. “The legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”

And in case you didn’t catch the irony: the Swiss military rejected Palantir in part because of fears about a heavy-handed American entity with uncomfortably close ties to U.S. intelligence. Palantir’s response to the reporting of that rejection? Behave like a heavy-handed American entity trying to bully a small foreign publication into submission. If anyone at Palantir had run this decision through their own pattern-recognition software, you’d hope a few red flags would have popped up.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit has done exactly what anyone with a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect could have predicted. The original Republik articles were about the Swiss government politely but firmly declining Palantir’s advances—an embarrassing but relatively contained story.

Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.

The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.

It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.

For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.

But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke.

Seriously, how fucking fragile are the egos in the Palantir executive suite that they can’t handle a bit of mildly embarrassing reporting? Grow up.

A Zurich court is expected to rule on the case in March. Whatever the outcome, Palantir has already lost the only contest that matters: the one for public perception. For a company that sells the ability to see around corners, they apparently never thought to search “The Streisand Effect.”

TOPEKA — Transgender rights activist Jaelynn Abegg was furious Thursday morning when she received a letter from the state informing her that her driver’s license had been invalidated because of a new state law.

Abegg, a Wichita resident, said she would only get a new driver’s license if she needs one before fleeing the state, which she plans to do as soon as she can afford it. In the meantime, she figures her U.S. passport will be “ID enough.”

“When things like this happen, I honestly get a little bit of a demon of rebellion in me, and I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to manifest that, if at all right now, but I can tell you that I’m very angry,” Abegg said. “I’m heartbroken. This is my home state. I’ve lived here all but two years of my life, and yet, every year since I’ve been living as a woman and having come out as transgender, this state has done nothing but break my heart. If this state was a romantic partner, I would definitely call this an abusive relationship at this point.”

The Kansas Department of Revenue this week sent a letter to Kansans affected by a new law, which took effect Thursday, that requires the gender marker on a driver’s license to match a person’s sex at birth.

The letter informs trans Kansans that because the Legislature didn’t include a grace period for updating credentials, they are “invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” A spokesman for the agency told Kansas Reflector the law invalidated about 1,700 licenses.

The letter directed trans Kansans to surrender their driver’s license to the state before they can receive a new one, which will cost them $8.

“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the unsigned letter said.

Republicans in the Legislature placed transgender Kansans in their crosshairs at the start of this year’s session. The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing with less than 24 hours notice on the second day of the session for a bill that would invalidate their driver’s licenses. The bill was a response to a Kansas Court of Appeals ruling last year that determined there was no harm in letting people change their gender markers, which Kansans have done since at least 2002 with no complaints.

A week after the rushed hearing, in a flurry of procedural maneuvers, the committee took action on the bill without warning. Republicans added language that would make it illegal for someone to use a public building bathroom, or similar space, like a locker room, that conflicts with their sex at birth. They then inserted the contents of the House bill into an unrelated Senate bill that passed the year before. That allowed the House and Senate to pass Senate Bill 244 the next day without ever holding a public hearing on the bathroom provision.

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill on Feb. 13. The House and Senate subsequently overrode her veto with all but one Republican, Rep. Mark Schreiber of Emporia, voting in favor of the bill.

Abegg, who organized a Feb. 6 “pee-in” protest, in which trans people and their allies filled a bathroom at the Statehouse, said lawmakers were “blatantly subverting the democratic process … because they know they’re going to get blowback.”

“This is a hallmark of a Legislature and of a government that has a deep, deep sickness in it, and it really saddens me that we’re living to see days like this, where there’s that sort of situation going on, and there’s not a greater public outcry about it,” Abegg said. “This should be a concern to everyone who values democracy and who values Kansas as a free state.”

Trans Liberty, a political action committee that fights for trans rights, issued its first-ever statewide evacuation order Thursday, when it urged transgender Kansans to flee.

Samantha Boucher, founder of Trans Liberty PAC, said in a statement there is “something deeply wrong with a government that erases its own citizens’ legal identities.”

Abegg said the warning to leave is “absolutely the right approach.”

“I don’t think that legislators in Kansas are done harassing trans people,” Abegg said. “I think that transgender health care for adults is coming next. It would not shock me within the next two to five years to see them come after name changes for transgender people. The cruelty has always been the point, and the objective has always been the complete erasure of transgender people from public life.”

Jessie Lawson, a trans woman from Wichita, initially planned to go to the DMV and refuse to pay for a new license, then decided against it.

“I can work from home and, for the moment, minimize the risk of getting pulled over,” Lawson said.

She said her first thought when she read the letter from the state was to wonder “how conservatives can live with so much fear and hate in their hearts.”

“Even at my most angry, I’ve never wanted to see an entire demographic of people wiped off the planet the way they do. It’s unreal,” she said. “The second thought is how I’m going to survive now that bigotry has been officially sanctioned by the state of Kansas.”

Lawson said she has wrestled with whether she should leave the state where she has lived her entire life.

“I have a great job and own my own home,” Lawson said. “All of my friends are here. Leaving would be very difficult for me. At the same time, this place is becoming increasingly hard for me to exist safely as bigotry takes more and more control of the state government.”

She added: “Please publish whatever you get from us. There needs to be a record that we existed and strove for peace and joy as long as we could.”

Rep. Brooklynne Mosley, D-Lawrence, posted on her Facebook page that she would be available Friday to drive people to the DMV to replace their birth certificates. She said she was willing to personally pay for up to five individuals’ fees if they have financial constraints.

The new law also affects birth certificates.

Jill Bronaugh, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said individuals will be responsible for contacting the Office of Vital Statistics to replace their invalidated birth certificates, and a $20 fee will apply.

The agency identified 1,849 birth certificates on which the sex has been changed, which can be attributed to correcting data entry errors or recognizing gender changes, she said.

“Each amended birth certificate will be reviewed manually by staff to determine if the birth certificate must be invalidated and amended,” Bronaugh said. “This process is expected to take several months to complete.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

LAWRENCE — Two transgender men from Lawrence are suing the state over a new law that invalidates driver’s licenses and restricts bathroom use based on sex assigned at birth, citing numerous constitutional rights and fear of violence.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Philadelphia-based Ballard Spahr law firm filed the lawsuit on the men’s behalf late Thursday in Douglas County District Court. The lawsuit also asks the court to block the law from taking effect while the case is being argued.

They argue that House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, which took effect Thursday, violates constitutional rights to personal autonomy, privacy, equity, due process and freedom of expression.

“By invalidating Plaintiffs’ licenses and barring them from restrooms that align with their gender identity, SB 244 demeans their personhood, obstructs their ability to participate equally in public life, and exposes them to heightened risks of harassment and violence by forcibly outing them as transgender,” attorneys argued in their request for a temporary injunction.

The law also violates a provision of the Kansas Constitution that requires statutes to have only one subject, they wrote. The first part of the law deals with government documents while the second part deals with private spaces in public buildings.

The Legislature adopted the law through a series of procedural moves that were designed to minimize public input and opposition: A rushed hearing on a bill to regulate gender markers on driver’s licenses and birth certificates, an unscheduled move to add a provision that unleashes vigilante policing of bathrooms, the shuffling of legislation from a House to Senate bill, an immediate vote in both chambers, and silenced debate when overriding the governor’s veto in the House.

“The Act targets transgender Kansans across multiple, unrelated domains of their lives,” the lawsuit says. “This sweeping law restricts transgender individuals from obtaining driver’s licenses reflecting their gender identity and bans transgender people from accessing restrooms or other single-sex spaces in a range of public places including libraries, courthouses, state parks, hospitals, and interstate rest stops.”

The bathroom restrictions apply to buildings owned or leased from the government, even if they are controlled by private entities, the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs are two transgender men from Lawrence, identified by the pseudonyms Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe, who were both assigned female sex at birth. They both have birth certificates from another state, legally changed their names in 2020, and work in government-owned buildings where they consistently use the men’s bathroom.

By continuing to use the bathrooms they have used for years without incident, they argue, they would be breaking the law. They could be fined or charged with a crime, and they can be sued by anyone who claims to be “aggrieved” by their presence in the bathroom. If they begin to use the bathrooms associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, they will be forcibly outed as transgender, subjecting them to harassment and possible violence.

And, the lawsuit says, they may still be sued by “aggrieved” individuals who assume they are in the wrong bathroom because they both appear to be men.

In a sworn statement attached to the lawsuit, Daniel said he was raised in southern California in “an extremely religious family” and knew from a young age that he was transgender. He said he moved to Kansas to attend college in 2014, found “my true self” and gained access to gender-affirming medical care. Only his family and close friends know he is trans.

“That is one of the reasons I am proceeding under a pseudonym in this case,” he said. “I do not want to publicly reveal that I am transgender. I want to protect my privacy, and to protect myself from harassment, violence, and discrimination, as well as retaliation for trying to protect my rights. I am also worried about backlash against my fiance, family, and employer if people learn I am transgender.”

Matthew said in a sworn statement that he has lived openly as a man since starting college in 2019. He said he has been harassed in bathrooms before and that being outed as transgender would be alienating, isolating and dangerous.

“I want to protect my privacy, and to protect myself from harassment, violence, and discrimination, as well as retaliation for trying to protect my rights,” he said. “I am also worried about backlash against those close to me if people learn I am transgender.”

The lawsuit, supported by documentation from medical professionals, explains that a person’s gender identity “is their deeply felt, internal sense of belonging to a particular gender.”

Everyone has a gender identity. Cisgender people have a gender that aligns with their sex assigned at birth. Neither cisgender nor transgender people can change their identities as if they were flipping a switch.

The incongruence between gender identity and sex assigned at birth can cause stress known as “gender dysphoria.”

“Being transgender is not in and of itself a medical condition to be cured,” the lawsuit says. “But untreated gender dysphoria can result in significant lifelong distress, clinically significant anxiety and depression, self-harming behaviors, substance misuse, and suicidality.”

The ability to change a gender marker has significant social, legal, and safety implications for transgender people, the lawsuit says.

“Transgender people experience incredibly high levels of discrimination and violence,” the lawsuit said. “But being able to live in society in accordance with their gender identity is a critical determinant of health and well-being for transgender people. Policies that require transgender people to use restrooms and hold identity documents consistent with their sex assigned at birth contribute to worsened mental health, in part because of harassment or ridicule, denial of service or access to facilities, or violence.”

There is no evidence that restricting bathroom usage promotes public safety.

Attorneys argue the new law is the latest attempt by the Legislature to leverage “the state’s power to attack transgender Kansans.”

They said laws passed in recent years “excluded transgender students from full participation in school, deprived transgender adolescents of health care, and targeted transgender individuals in jails, among other indignities.”

“Now, over the Governor’s veto, the Legislature has passed Senate Bill 244, yet another law that singles out transgender people for discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment,” they wrote. “This latest attack on transgender people’s right to exist in civil society poses an imminent threat of irreparable harm to Plaintiffs.”

Raising Dragons