New from the Institute for Free Speech
IFS Welcomes Summer Research Interns Meghan Brandabur and Mark D’Ostilio
By Scott Blackburn
The Institute for Free Speech is excited to host Meghan Brandabur and Mark D’Ostilio as interns in our Research Department this summer.
Meghan is entering her fifth year at Miami University (of Ohio), where she is part of the University’s combined BA/MA program. Meghan will graduate in May of 2020 with the following degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies; Bachelor of Arts in Strategic Communication; Bachelor of Arts in Diplomacy and Global Politics; and Master of Arts in Political Science. Last summer, Meghan participated in The Fund for American Studies’ Institute on Economics and International Affairs, and she interned at the National Defense University’s College of Information and Cyberspace. At this internship, she conducted research on cyber relations between Russia and the United States and had her work published…
Mark is a rising senior at the Pennsylvania State University, where he studies Criminology and History. In his time on campus, Mark has worked as a Research Assistant on the Penn State Intergroup Hostility Project, which sparked his passion for free speech in the United States. In addition, Mark has had valuable summer experiences working as a legal intern and as a student studying Crime, Law, and, Justice from an international perspective in the Netherlands. Mark is looking forward to returning to school in the fall, where he will be serving as President of the Penn State Justice Association…
Meghan and Mark will focus their efforts this summer on researching restrictions on political speech, and the effects these regulations have on First Amendment freedoms. They will also contribute to the Institute’s blog with original commentary on a variety of free speech issues and help produce the Institute’s Daily Media Update.
Congress
New York Times: House Opens Tech Antitrust Inquiry With Look at Threat to News Media
By Cecilia Kang
“Concentration in the digital advertising market has pushed local journalism to the verge of extinction,” said Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island.
The hearing was the start of the House Judiciary Committee’s inquiry into possible anticompetitive behavior by big tech companies, part of a rising wave of federal scrutiny of the industry…
The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing 2,000 news organizations, including The New York Times, has long argued that Facebook and Google have become the biggest online advertising companies at the expense of publishers, which now rely on the platforms to find audiences.
Leaders of the committee have pushed for passage of a bill that would give news organizations the ability to band together to negotiate greater compensation from online services that distribute their news…
“Smaller news organizations don’t stand a fair negotiating chance when they try to negotiate deals with the platform giants,” said Representative Doug Collins, a Republican from Georgia and a co-author of the bill with Mr. Cicilline…
David Pitofsky, the general counsel of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, said that “the marketplace for news is broken.”…
News Corp supports Mr. Cicilline and Mr. Collins’s Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The law would exempt the publishers from antitrust rules for four years, protecting them from charges of price collusion…
Matt Schruers, a vice president at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said at the hearing that his tech industry trade group accepted additional scrutiny because of the size of the companies being reviewed by Congress. And he said the industry wanted to encourage good journalism.
But Mr. Schruers said giving antitrust exemptions to publishers was risky and could ultimately harm consumers and the economy.
Mother Jones: How Russia Can Spend Money to Influence the 2020 Election-Legally
By Pema Levy
In April, four Democrats and one Republican in Congress introduced a bill, the PAID AD Act, to apply the same prohibitions on broadcast ads to digital ones… Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) will introduce companion legislation in the Senate soon.
The PAID AD Act also addresses a separate loophole: There is no prohibition on foreign nationals running ads about hot-button political topics that are clearly meant to influence an election, as long as they don’t mention a candidate…
In 2016, “Russia was running ads that did not mention candidates that were designed to suppress voting, to increase division and hatred, to focus on issues that clearly were intended to influence the election,” says Fred Wertheimer, a campaign finance expert whose nonprofit, Democracy 21, helped craft the PAID Ad Act…
The Stop Secret Foreign Interference in Elections Act, introduced by three Democratic senators in May 2018, would, among other transparency measures, require political nonprofits to disclose any foreign donors. The Senate has yet to hold a hearing on the measure…
Federal campaign finance restrictions on political advertising exempt media outlets acting in their legitimate press function. This exemption is aimed at maintaining the freedom of the press, but in the era of false news and propaganda, it also creates a vulnerability…
“Everybody is skeptical of the government defining who is and who is not a media entity and who is and who is not acting within the scope of the legitimate press function,” says [Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center]. “I think any entity that claims to be a media company is given pretty broad leeway to operate, even if their activities or expenditures could have the effect of influencing an election.”
The Media
Politico: Newspapers’ Embarrassing Lobbying Campaign
By Jack Shafer
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019, introduced in the House in April, and its Senate version, would allow print and online news companies to cartelize into a united front against Google and Facebook…
This proposed antitrust exemption-being pushed by the 2,000-plus member News Media Alliance trade group-is misguided on several levels. For one thing, it would be wrong to pass a law that would prop up one media sector by selectively bestowing special competitive privileges on it. The bill would not allow broadcasters to join the new cartel. The bill’s supporters also falsely blame Google and Facebook for the newspaper industry’s decay when circulation declines-especially when measured per capita-predate the emergence of the web…
The newspapers that are struggling to compete for digital dollars have partly themselves to blame. In 2000, classified ads made up about 40 percent of newspaper revenue, the Minneapolis Tribune reports. By 2012, that figure had dropped to 18 percent, but Google and Facebook played almost no part in this collapse… As I’ve written before, newspaper companies were quick to move classified action to the new, online companies they founded. Gannett, McClatchy, Knight Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Central Newspapers, A.H. Belo, and the Washington Post Co. banded together in 1998 to sell automobiles-long a classified print product-on Cars.com. In 1999, Cox newspapers created Autotrader.com. In 2000, Knight Ridder and Tribune purchased CareerBuilder.com, and two years later Gannett bought in. Apartments.com was yet another co-venture of five newspaper media companies…
Never forget that when newspapers were king and held pricing power over advertisers, they gouged advertisers with ever higher ad rates, and they didn’t mind going to Congress to protect their position then, either. In 1980, Washington Post Co. CEO Katharine Graham lobbied Congress to block AT&T from starting its own “electronic yellow pages.” When a senator told Graham that what really worried her was a new product that would destroy her advertising base, Graham said, “You’re damn right it is.”
Online Speech Platforms
Vice News: This Deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg Tests Facebook’s Fake Video Policies
By Samantha Cole
Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram.
The video, created by artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe in partnership with advertising company Canny, shows Mark Zuckerberg sitting at a desk, seemingly giving a sinister speech about Facebook’s power. The video is framed with broadcast chyrons that say “We’re increasing transparency on ads,” to make it look like it’s part of a news segment.
(On Tuesday evening, CBS requested that Facebook take down the video, as it displays “an unauthorized use of the CBSN trademark,” a spokesperson said.)
“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” Zuckerberg’s likeness says, in the video. “I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future.”
The original, real video is from a September 2017 address Zuckerberg gave about Russian election interference on Facebook. The caption of the Instagram post says it’s created using CannyAI’s video dialogue replacement (VDR) technology.
This deepfake of Zuckerberg is one of several made by Canny in collaboration with Posters, including ones of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, as part of Spectre, an exhibition that took place as part of the Sheffield Doc Fest in the UK.
“We will treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram,” a spokesperson for Instagram told Motherboard. “If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages.”
Following the viral spread of a manipulated Facebook video of House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook has been forced to take a stance on whether fake or altered images are allowed to stay up on the site. Instead of deleting the video, the company chose to de-prioritize it, so that it appeared less frequently in users’ feeds, and placed the video alongside third party fact-checker information.
FEC
USA Today: Exclusive: Rep. Greg Pence amends filing that showed lodging charge at Trump hotel
By Maureen Groppe
Greg Pence, a freshman congressman and brother of Vice President Mike Pence, reported spending more than $7,600 in campaign funds on lodging at the Trump International Hotel in the first few months after his election in November, although lawmakers are supposed to pay for their own housing in Washington.
After USA TODAY asked about the expenses included on his Federal Election Commission disclosure reports, Pence’s spokesman, Kyle Robertson, declined to say whether the Indiana Republican stayed at the hotel before getting an apartment in Washington.
Hours after USA TODAY pressed for more detail on the nature of the lodging expenses, the campaign filed an amended FEC report that changed the designation of the expenses to “fundraising event costs.”
Federal election rules allow campaign funds to be spent on hotels for fundraising events. And Pence separately reported more than $15,000 in catering and reception costs at Trump’s hotel in December and January…
Federal rules on the use of campaign funds for personal expenses were tightened in the 1990s after Mike Pence and other candidates were criticized for paying mortgages and other living expenses with campaign funds in 1990.
Rules now state that campaign funds can’t be used for expenses like housing that the candidate or officeholder would have even if they weren’t campaigning.
“Using campaign funds for personal use is prohibited,” the FEC says.
Robertson said the expenses initially reported as “lodging” were “all fundraising event costs” but he declined to offer specifics…
“In order to avoid confusion here from hostile reporters, the FEC report will be amended to change the description from `lodging’ to `fundraising event costs,'” Robertson said before the updated reports were filed.
The States
New York Times: Ending Secret ‘Dark Money’ Political Donations in New Jersey
By Nick Corasaniti
The New Jersey Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, passed a bill on Monday that Mr. Murphy was expected to sign requiring nonprofit groups seeking to influence elections or legislation to report donors who contribute $10,000 or more…
The New Jersey bill would also require groups to report expenditures of more than $3,000 and would raise the contribution limit to state and county party committees in an effort to shift donors into a more transparent and regulated system.
Though lauded by campaign finance watchdogs, New Jersey’s bill, like campaign finance disclosure laws in other states, has been criticized by conservative and liberal activists as being overly broad.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, which supports “carefully drawn disclosure rules” at a national level, has been a vocal opponent of the bill and sent a letter to state senators reiterating its concerns.
The A.C.L.U. and others argue that forcing groups that run ads trying to influence legislation – the kind that exhort voters to “call your senator if you support this bill” – to disclose the sources of their funding could scare off donors, particularly for groups involved in polarizing debates like abortion and gun control.
“It’s trying to make issue advocacy organizations seem like campaigns, which we’re not,” said Amol Sinha, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. of New Jersey.
The New Jersey chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political network, released a statement last month expressing similar concerns.
“We support the rights of all New Jerseyans to engage in the causes they believe in, and this legislation would make it harder,” said Erica Jedynak, the group’s state director, in the statement. “This is a sad day for civic advocacy and charitable giving across the political spectrum.”
National Review: America Is in the Middle of a Quiet Free-Speech Revolution on Campus
By David French
[I]t is with a pride similar to that of a father for a successful child that I watched Texas this week follow Tennessee to become the 17th state to enact campus free-speech legislation.
In fact, Texas isn’t just following Tennessee, it’s following a number of its neighbors. More states have passed campus free-speech bills in the past five months than in any other year in American history. Eight have been passed, seven enacted.
Moreover, this legislation comes at the very moment when campus speech codes are in a state of dramatic decline. In ten years, the percentage of surveyed universities with clearly unconstitutional speech codes (such institutions are “red light” in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education parlance) has shrunk from a whopping 74.2 percent to 28.5 percent.
But while it’s encouraging to see speech codes disappear, and the litigation record of free-speech lawyers against campus censors is excellent, campus free-speech bills represent a true sledgehammer against censorship. At a stroke, they often do away with speech zones (which purport to limit free-speech activities to small sections of campus), obliterate speech codes, protect freedom of association, and mandate that students be made aware of their free-speech rights.
Overall, 16 states have dealt with speech zones. A total of 14 states have clearly and unequivocally protected the free-association rights of religious, political, and ideological groups (functionally overruling dreadful Supreme Court precedent in the process), and seven states have precisely and properly restricted anti-harassment laws and placed them within clearly constitutional limits.
