March 30, 2023

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The Courts

Daily Montanan: Sign of the times: Montana DOT tells residents to remove Pinocci signs or department will

By Darrell Ehrlick

.....The Montana Department of Transportation has sent letters to residents and Public Service Commissioner Randy Pinocci, a Republican from Sun River, warning them to either take down political signage from the 2022 election or face penalties...

If the owners do not remove the signs “in a timely manner,” they could face criminal penalties...

Montana law – the Montana Outdoor Advertising Act — says that signs must be removed from property within 14 days of an election. However, the sign prohibition only occurs in political advertising, not other types. Attorney Matthew Monforton, who is representing Pinocci, Pattison and Hepp, pointed out that “for sale” or advertising signs are legal for much longer periods of time. In a complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Helena, Monforton said that the government is making decisions on content, for example, which campaigns or politicians can place and keep signs.

All the signs that Monforton is aware of are on private property.

In his case, Monforton argues that Montana has fashioned political signage rules that specifically target political signs, and fail to address other advertising or even property “for sale” signage.

Congress

Seth Dillon: Some Babylon Bee headlines were just entered into the congressional record

.....My name is Seth Dillon and I'm the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a popular humor site that satirizes real-world events and public figures. Our experience with Big Tech censorship dates back to 2018 when Facebook started working with fact-checkers to crack down on the spread of misinformation. We published a headline that read, "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin The News Before Publication." Snopes rated that story false, prompting Facebook to threaten us with a permanent ban.

Since then our jokes have been repeatedly fact-checked, flagged for hate speech, and removed for incitement to violence, resulting in a string of warnings and a drastic reduction in our reach. Even our email service suspended us for spreading harmful misinformation. We found ourselves taking breaks from writing jokes to go on TV and defend our right to tell them in the first place. That's an awkward position to be in as humorists in a free society.

Courier Journal: Rand Paul: Do Congressional Republicans really want to emulate China by banning TikTok?

By Rand Paul

.....Before banning TikTok, these censors might want to discover that China’s government already bans TikTok. Hmmm . . . do we really want to emulate China’s speech bans? …

TikTok must be banned, the censors say, because they are owned and controlled by the Chinese communist government, but does TikTok do the Chinese government’s bidding? Well, go to the app and search for Falun Gong, the anti-communist religious sect that is persecuted in China. Go to TikTok and search for videos advocating Taiwan’s independence, criticism of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping. Videos are all over TikTok that are critical of official Chinese positions. That’s why TikTok is banned in China.

As Drs. Mueller and Farhat of Georgia Tech write: “If nationalistic fears about Chinese influence operations lead to a departure from American constitutional principles supporting free and open political discourse, we will have succeeded in undermining our system of government more effectively than any Chinese propaganda could do.”

DHS

Just the News: DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide

By Nick Givas and John Solomon

.....When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in "best practices."

A year later, Mayorkas' department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from "blowback," FOIA documents showed.

More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board's former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United.

What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by "hostile" news outlets.

Free Expression

Wall Street Journal: Columbia Law Students Are Upset

By The Editorial Board

.....On Feb. 23, members of the Columbia Federalist Society went to Washington and met with Justice Kavanaugh at the High Court. On March 14, Columbia Law School posted a photograph of the meeting on its Instagram account with a brief note that the law students had a chance to “engage in conversation” and hear about “the Court’s deliberation process and how to be an effective advocate.” ...

Columbia student groups responded with vitriol aimed at the university for daring to “uplift” what they considered an offensive and ”hurtful” image—and at the students who met the Justice...

Student organizations, including the Black Law Students Association of Columbia and the reproductive rights group If/When/How, have written letters demanding that the school remove the social-media post...

In a bizarre attempt at retaliation, the Black Law Students Association said it will no longer support Columbia Law’s recruitment program for incoming black students, explaining that “the Columbia Law School Administration may be comfortable wallowing in ‘apoliticism’ and neutrality, but we are not.” ...

One Columbia law student told us that speaking out on the Kavanaugh flap is impossible. “I’m a Democrat and a liberal person and so are my friends but none of us can say anything,” said the student, who asked not to be identified. “If I feel this way, I can’t imagine how conservative students feel.”

Newsweek: Stanford Dean's Letter Is Great, but Disrupters Should Be Punished

By Ilya Shapiro

.....Why can't Stanford Law School punish rule-breakers—after a fair investigation and hearing, of course—while also giving mere norm-breakers a stern talking-to or remedial training? Instead, the entire law school will have to endure a mandatory session on "freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession." ...

Clearly, we need more exogenous shocks to the system. For example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has asked the State Bar of Texas to review the "character and fitness" of bar applicants from Stanford. Good: All state bars should scrutinize the admission of those who—as 20- and 30-somethings, not children—openly defy the standards of the legal profession. Maybe Judges Jim Ho (of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) and Lisa Branch (of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit) should extend their boycott of Yale for clerkship hiring to Stanford. And that's not to mention pressure from Stanford Law School alumni and donors, too.

Candidates and Campaigns

New York Times: A Campaign Aide Didn’t Write That Email. A.I. Did.

By Shane Goldmacher

.....The Democratic Party has begun testing the use of artificial intelligence to write first drafts of some fund-raising messages, appeals that often perform better than those written entirely by human beings.

Fake A.I. images of Donald J. Trump getting arrested in New York spread faster than they could be fact-checked last week.

And voice-cloning tools are producing vividly lifelike audio of President Biden — and many others — saying things they did not actually say.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just coming soon to the 2024 campaign trail. It’s already here.

The swift advance of A.I. promises to be as disruptive to the political sphere as to broader society. Now any amateur with a laptop can manufacture the kinds of convincing sounds and images that were once the domain of the most sophisticated digital players. This democratization of disinformation is blurring the boundaries between fact and fake at a moment when the acceptance of universal truths — that Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in 2020, for example — is already being strained.

The States

Center Square: Social media companies could see $250,000/day fine for banning Arizona candidates

By Cole Lauterbach

.....Social media platforms that choose to suspend or ban candidates for office would face tens of thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of dollars a day in fines under legislation working its way through the Legislature.

The House Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved Senate Bill 1106 along party lines. The bill defines how a social media suspends, bans or reduces the exposure of an account. This is also referred to as “shadowbanning.”

Under the bill, the Arizona Secretary of State may fine a social media platform $25,000 a day for hindering the speech of a candidate for office. The penalty increases to $250,000 a day if the issue concerns a candidate for statewide office...

The legislation also provides similar protections for accounts identifying as journalists.

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