In the News
Republican National Lawyers Association: President Trump Makes Another Outstanding Nomination To The FEC
The Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) supports the nomination of Allen Dickerson to be a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission (FEC)…
RNLA Board of Governors Member and former FEC Chairman Matt Petersen [said]: “Allen will be an outstanding addition to the FEC. As one of the country’s preeminent free speech litigators, Allen is a leading expert on how campaign finance law intersects with free speech. He is also a true gentleman. Allen’s exceptional background and experience, along with his even-keeled temperament, will allow him to be a leader on the Commission for many years to come.”
RNLA President David Warrington spoke for RNLA leadership when he said: “Allen is a brilliant legal mind committed to the rule of law and protecting the rights of all Americans to participate in the political process. In addition to his military service, this is another opportunity for Allen to serve his country in this important capacity. He will be an extremely valuable addition to the Federal Election Commission.”
Center for Responsive Politics: With FEC again defanged, Trump’s latest nominee likely to face opposition
By Karl Evers-Hillstrom
Dickerson cheered the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision that unleashed nearly $1 billion in dark money into federal elections over the last decade, arguing that the ruling greatly expanded Americans’ freedom to speak on political issues. Since then, Dickerson has led the Institute for Free Speech’s legal challenges against laws and regulations that would force politically active nonprofits to disclose their donors.
Formerly the Center for Competitive Politics, the Institute for Free Speech opposed the DISCLOSE Act, Democrats’ attempt to crack down on dark money spending following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling. Dickerson argued that the bill chilled free speech rights of nonprofits to advocate on political issues. Senate Republicans successfully blocked the legislation.
Dickerson supported reversing a district court decision that unsuccessfully attempted to reveal donors to dark money groups. He led a lawsuit against California over its law that required nonprofits to disclose names of donors to the state. He also supported a lawsuit that challenged the legality of Alaska’s relatively low contribution limits.
New from the Institute for Free Speech
Coronavirus and Mass Protests Demonstrate Need to Proactively Protect First Amendment Rights
By Alec Greven
These past few months have been especially challenging for many in the United States. The dangers of coronavirus and the widespread protests against police brutality have placed enormous stress on government leaders. These emergencies have given officials more latitude to infringe on the First Amendment rights of American citizens.
During times of emergency, the First Amendment is more important than ever. Government officials have a tendency during crises to overreact to potential dangers and limit more expression than they should. Additionally, emergencies can heighten social tensions and make society as a whole less tolerant of controversial ideas or statements that challenge the status quo. And as citizens naturally react to government policies and ongoing controversies during a crisis, it is imperative that our elected leaders are forward looking and resolve to protect free expression before an emergency occurs.
Supreme Court
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Foreign groups that receive American funding to fight HIV and AIDS must still pledge to oppose sex work, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the requirement. A similar requirement for U.S. nonprofits was struck down as unconstitutional in 2013…
“In short, plaintiffs’ foreign affiliates are foreign organizations, and foreign organizations operating abroad have no First Amendment rights,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority’s opinion…
“The last time this case came before us,” writes Justice Breyer [in his dissenting opinion], “we held that the First Amendment forbids the Government from distorting their speech by requiring, as a condition of receiving federal funds, that they ‘pledge allegiance’ to a state-sponsored message. This time, the question is whether the American organizations enjoy that same constitutional protection against government-compelled distortion when they speak through clearly identified affiliates that have been incorporated overseas. The answer to that question, as I see it, is yes.” …
It’s easy to imagine the conservative justices in this case coming to the same conclusion as Breyer if the compelled speech were of a different variety.
Republicans have (rightfully) objected to, for instance, a California law compelling crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion to display messages about where women could get an abortion. Would that suddenly be OK if the California centers themselves were excluded but any international anti-abortion groups they partnered with to help pregnant women in need were still compelled to advertise abortion services?
Congress
By Chris Mills Rodrigo and Maggie Miller
PRESSURE FROM SENATORS: Three Democratic senators on Tuesday urged Facebook to more aggressively purge white supremacist groups from its platform.
In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said the CEO has failed to enforce existing community standards that would remove racist and violent extremist content from Facebook…
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, DON’T SAY SOMETHING: A measure that would require presidential campaigns to report attempts by foreign nationals to interfere in elections was removed from the Senate’s bipartisan Intelligence Authorization Act, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Tuesday.
The clause was based on Warner’s Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, which requires presidential campaigns to report all contacts with foreign nationals seeking to interfere in the election process to both the FBI and the Federal Election Commission (FEC)…
Roll Call: Effort to crack Big Tech’s legal shield gains bipartisan momentum
By Dean DeChiaro
Both Republicans and Democrats have frequently criticized a landmark 1996 law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that protects online companies from being sued for third-party content posted on their sites…
But with one bipartisan bill, authored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., expected to win committee approval this week and another benefiting from the support of Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., changes to Section 230 seem more likely than ever…
Graham’s bill, first introduced in March with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., seeks to crack down on the spread of child pornography and other illegal content online by revoking automatic Section 230 protections for online companies and requiring them to “earn” them back through content moderation…
The Judiciary Committee is expected to advance the Graham bill at a markup on Thursday.
Thune’s bill would take a different approach by allowing companies to keep their immunity under Section 230 but requiring them to post their content moderation practices online and explain what content is removed. It would also require them to be more responsive to user complaints and allow federal regulators and state governments more leeway when pursuing civil lawsuits against the companies.
Thune said the legislation is rooted in the concern that social media companies “are often not transparent and accountable enough to consumers,” but he cautioned against a heavy-handed approach.
Online Speech Platforms
Washington Post: Social media companies should not act as censors
By Kathleen Parker
Censoring the president of the United States, even by a nongovernmental entity enforcing its own rules of civility, is fraught with potential for collateral damage. Hate or nefarious purposes once revealed in daylight are banished to the darkness where they fester and become more foul. Suppressing someone’s thoughts, especially the president’s, leads to a suppression of public debate. As Syracuse University’s Roy S. Gutterman (and others before him) have put it, the answer to hate speech is more speech.
It isn’t the responsibility of social media companies to sanitize the village square, but does that mean they have no responsibility for content? Public opinion may be mixed, but pressures are mounting for companies to step up and clean up their communities. Advertisers, under the banner “Stop Hate for Profit,” have begun boycotting Facebook because of its refusal to block the president’s posts…
What is speech but the expression of thoughts? And, how, exactly, should we purge people’s unacceptable thoughts?
Such is the quandary of a free society, and so my free thought is this: Let everybody talk, especially the president of the United States, so that we know exactly what they are thinking. Better that than to be unpleasantly surprised.
Wall Street Journal: Facebook Bans Large Segment of Boogaloo Movement
By David Uberti and Rachel Levy
[Facebook Inc.] said in a blog post it removed more than 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts and 106 groups tied to a boogaloo-affiliated network “that actively seeks to commit violence.” The removals came alongside an additional takedown of 400 groups and 100 pages that hosted content broadly supportive of the boogaloo movement.
The large segment “is actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions,” Facebook said in the blog post, adding that “members of this network seek to recruit others within the broader boogaloo movement.” …
Facebook removed the boogaloo accounts after a targeted investigation by human analysts, officials said…
Those systems rely on “hashes,” or digital fingerprints that identify extremist propaganda and artificial intelligence-based “classifiers” trained to evaluate content like a human reviewer. They proved effective at minimizing jihadist groups such as Islamic State on the platform in recent years.
But human-led takedowns could be more important for far-right or white supremacist groups, company officials said. Such content tends to be more decentralized and often share hard-to-decipher content laced with irony and sarcasm, the company officials added…
Facebook’s move Tuesday doesn’t ban boogaloo content altogether. The company said it sought to ban a wide-ranging boogaloo network that is nonetheless “distinct from the broader and loosely-affiliated boogaloo movement because it actively seeks to commit violence.”
The Hill: Facebook to prioritize original reporting in feed
By Chris Mills Rodrigo
Facebook announced Tuesday that it will begin prioritizing original reporting in its news feed.
In a blog post, two senior employees explained that the platform will use artificial intelligence to determine which articles on a particular issue are most often cited as the original source.
Facebook will also demote content lacking transparent info about editorial staff of the publisher.
This change would theoretically decrease the reach of clickbait sites that just repost articles from other publications.
Tuesday’s blog post stressed that the changes will not dramatically change the feed.
“We anticipate most news publishers won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of these updates,” Campbell Brown, vice president of Global News Partnerships, and Jon Levin, product manager, said.
New York Times: Reddit’s C.E.O. on Why He Banned ‘The_Donald’ Subreddit
By Kevin Roose
On Monday, Reddit – a site that for years was considered one of the internet’s dirtiest sludge pits – barred more than 2,000 communities as part of a broad crackdown on hate speech…
[A]fter the bans were announced, I interviewed [Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve] Huffman about the decision to take down The_Donald and many other subreddits. These are edited excerpts from our conversation…
Question: A few years ago, you were asked about banning The_Donald specifically, and you said, “There are arguments on both sides, but ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice.” What changed?
Answer: So The_Donald is complex, and I think reducing that community or any large political group to one thing or one viewpoint is impossible. One aspect of The_Donald is that it’s a very large political community that, at one point in time, represented the views of many Americans. Political speech is sacred in this country, and we applied that to Reddit as well.
At the same time, that community had rule-breaking content – content that was harassing or violence or bullying. And so our strategy has been to try to get that community to come in line with our content policies…
Techdirt: Google Threatens To Defund Techdirt? Where Are All The Politicians Complaining?
By Mike Masnick
A couple of weeks ago, we received yet another notice from Google that some of the pages on Techdirt violated its AdSense policies (AdSense is Google’s program for putting ads on 3rd party pages). We’ll get to what those pages were and what the complaints were in a moment, but the timing struck us as ironic — as it came a day after we had written about why Google sending a similar notice to The Federalist was not some conspiracy of “anti-conservative bias” to silence them. Yet, when it happened to the Federalist, a bunch of big name politicians and commentators went into overdrive attacking Google.
So my question: where are they now defending Techdirt? Hmm? …
Google said the following list of stories could not have Google ads, and gave the following reasons:
–Yes, Federal Agents Can Identify Anonymous Tor Users, Because Most People -Don’t Know How To Be Anonymous Reason: Dangerous or derogatory content
–Github Nukes Repository Over Use Of The Word ‘Retard’ Reason: Dangerous or derogatory content
–YouTube Takes Down Live Stream Over Copyright Claim…Before Stream Even Starts Reason: Dangerous or derogatory content
–The DOJ’s Plan To ‘Fix’ The T-Mobile Merger Is Already A Hot Mess Reason: Dangerous or derogatory content ….
[I]f you look at some of those links, you can probably guess why Google decided it didn’t want ads on those pages, and in other cases, it’s not clear at all, and there’s probably some weird comments in there. Google doesn’t tell us, and it’s too much of an effort to figure it out. But, when it happens to us, it doesn’t become a huge story.
Candidates and Campaigns
Washington Post: Biden campaign assails Facebook for ‘haggling’ with Trump over his online posts
By Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign demanded in a letter to Facebook that the company prevent misuse of its platform by President Trump to spread “hateful content” and misleading claims about mail-in voting ahead of the November election.
The letter, obtained by The Washington Post and addressed to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, is the latest in a series of complaints from the campaign about how Facebook enforces its rules for politicians…
The Monday communication, signed by Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, raised particular concern about revelations in a Washington Post article posted online Sunday about Facebook’s history of reworking its policies to accommodate inflammatory rhetoric and false claims from Trump, dating to his time as a candidate in 2015. The story recounted efforts by Facebook executives to persuade Trump to tweak or delete a post last month about sending in the military to quell the protests in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in police custody…
The letter also makes requests, including that Facebook remove previous Trump posts that claimed, without evidence, that voting by mail, which has been widespread in numerous states for years, is a source of electoral fraud.
Daily Caller: Joe Biden Announces He Will Not Hold Campaign Rallies, Citing Coronavirus Fears
By William Davis
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will not hold campaign rallies due to concerns over the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Biden announced the decision Tuesday, at his first press conference in 89 days, citing advice from his doctors.
“This is the most unusual campaign, I think, in modern history,” Biden said. “I’m gonna follow the doc’s orders, not just for me, but for the country.”
“That means that I am not going to be holding rallies,” Biden continued.
The New Republic: Democrats Can’t Quit Their Addiction to Big-Money Donors
By J.C. Pan
There’s long been a tension between Democrats speaking about the need for campaign finance reform and doing whatever they think they need to do to win-like when Obama, who had long denounced super PACs, embraced his own allied super PACs in 2012. Yet in 2016, Bernie Sanders-then still a curiosity that Democrats expected to fizzle out-disavowed corporate contributions and super PAC money and built a small-dollar fundraising juggernaut so successful that by the 2020 primaries, almost every Democratic contender followed suit (at least initially) in committing not to accept lobbyist or corporate PAC money.
Democrats have been increasingly conscious about where their campaign money comes from, at least in public. Every Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, including Biden, pledged not to take large donations from fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, or PACs-though plenty of candidates did take money from people connected to those industries. High-minded promises have often eroded in the face of needing cash: Both Biden and Elizabeth Warren reversed their original positions on accepting money from super PACs as the primary heated up.
If there briefly seemed to be some interest among Democrats in unshackling campaigns from corporate contributions and other forms of big money, that sentiment has all but vanished in the lead-up to November’s general election. The Biden campaign has amassed a number of super PAC contributions and donations from the wealthy, including $2 million from a recent fundraising Zoom call for big donors where “the minimum price to get on” was $50,000, according to The New York Times, or a little less than the median household income in Michigan. (The wealthy are encouraged to give up to $620,600 to the “Biden Victory Fund,” a joint venture of the Biden campaign, the Democratic National Party, and state Democratic parties launched last month that is designed so donors can skirt normal donation limits.)
The States
Associated Press: St. Louis mayor blasted for revealing identity of protesters
By Jim Salter
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson knows the trauma of violence – she and her children were present when her first husband was shot to death 25 years ago during an attempted carjacking. She was elected on a pledge to curb violence in her city.
Amid that backdrop, it’s not surprising that calls to “defund” police don’t sit well with her.
But Krewson went a step further: She publicly revealed the names and addresses of anti-police protesters, a decision that drew extra criticism in the tense weeks following George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white Minneapolis officer who pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck. More than 50,000 people have signed a petition calling for her resignation.
Releasing the names and addresses was dangerous “because you never know what someone else will do with that information,” Aldermanic President Lewis Reed said Tuesday.
Alderwoman Megan Green said Krewson’s action was “designed to intimidate and to quell dissent and to stop a movement that is happening not just locally” but across the country.
Greenwich Times: Police captain fired after ‘signgate’ files lawsuit against Greenwich, officials
By Ken Borsuk
Former police Capt. Mark Kordick has filed a lawsuit against the town of Greenwich, First Selectman Fred Camillo, former First Selectman Peter Tesei and two others claiming that his rights were violated when he was fired earlier this year.
Notice of the lawsuit was sent to the town Monday, and it was filed Tuesday in Superior Court in Stamford. In it, Kordick says his right to free speech was violated, that the town illegally removed political campaign signs he had put up as a registered voter and that the town retaliated against him for engaging in a protected right to engage in political speech while off-duty…
Kordick, a 31-year veteran of the GPD, was terminated in late February. He had been placed on paid leave on Oct. 28 after he admitted to paying for anonymous political signs linking Camillo, who was then the Republican candidate running for first selectman, to President Donald Trump.
The signs made it seem that Camillo endorsed Trump or vice versa, and included a website address that seemed to be for Camillo but actually directed visitors to a pro-Trump website…
In addition to Camillo and Tesei, the lawsuit also names as defendants former Republican Town Committee Chair Richard DiPreta and Jack Kriskey, who ran Camillo’s successful campaign for first selectman. Kordick alleges the four acted “with malice” to retaliate against him for political speech critical of Camillo by revealing his identity, making a complaint to the police and involving the department in a political matter.
