April 14, 2023

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This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].

In the News

Bloomberg Law: Broken State Speech Shield Unites Courts, Lawmakers Seeking Fix

By Allie Reed

.....Massachusetts lawyers, judges, and lawmakers are all asking for more clarity on the application of a law that protects First Amendment rights, causing the Supreme Judicial Court to consider revisions to a framework it recently altered.

Anti-SLAPP laws, or laws against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, are in place in most states and create a pathway for courts to quickly and cheaply throw out meritless lawsuits that seek to intimidate people exercising their First Amendment rights.

However, Massachusetts has a relatively weak law compared to other states and lags in promptly resolving cases. Additionally, the law only covers speech related to a person’s right to petition the government and isn’t a full-throated protection of all free speech, earning it a D+ from the Institute for Free Speech.

Massachusetts lawmakers and the judiciary each currently have the opportunity to reconsider this law.

The Supreme Judicial Court is now soliciting amicus briefs on whether to revise its framework for evaluating special motions to dismiss under the anti-SLAPP statute. At the same time, the legislature is considering a bill that would expand the statute to protect more types of speech.

Supreme Court

Americans for Prosperity: Gavin Newsom shouldn’t get to decide which businesses survive, and neither should Congress

By Casey Mattox

.....This week, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, joined by our friends at FIRE and The Reason Foundation, filed a brief in support of another case asking the Supreme Court to review California’s AB5. This lawsuit is on behalf of an organization called “Mobilize the Message,” an organization that works with political campaigns to knock doors on behalf of candidates.

AB5 regulates this door-to-door political activity, but it exempts door-to-door commercial sales. Again, some speech is favored, other speech – indeed basic advocacy – is discouraged. And California assigns these burdens depending on how the government feels about your speech.

For people engaged in speech-based activities (such as writers, salespeople, or therapists), your ability to obtain an exception was essentially dependent upon whether or not your client base was powerful enough to have lobbied for an exception. And, of course, the incumbent politicians giving out those exemptions are happy to regulate the very people who would like to hold them accountable and turn out the vote for their challengers.

The Courts

New York Times: What Protects Fox News Also Protects Our Democracy

By Jeff Kosseff

.....Given the evidence against Fox that already has been made public, it might seem unfair that Dominion continues to face such an uphill battle in this case. But it is a very good thing for our democracy that it is so difficult to prove actual malice.

A movement to erode this legal protection has gained steam in recent years, but the main push has not come from Fox critics. Rather, conservatives have characterized the protections as unfairly enabling liberal news outlets to lie. Commentators, politicians, judges and two Supreme Court justices have urged the court to reconsider these protections.

The Dominion case demonstrates why this politicization is the wrong course. Overturning nearly six decades of vital First Amendment precedent would not benefit conservatives, liberals or anyone other than those who seek to stifle reporting and criticism with the threat of litigation.

Biden Administration

NBC News: U.S. intel agencies may change how they monitor social media, chatrooms after missing leaked U.S. documents for weeks

By Carol E. Lee, Ken Dilanian and Dan De Luce

.....The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks, according to a senior administration official and a congressional official briefed on the matter.

The possible change in the intelligence-gathering process is just one potential shift as officials scramble to determine not only how the documents leaked but also how to prevent another damaging incident.

Online Speech Platforms

New York Times: Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

By Tiffany Hsu

.....When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives compared with four years earlier, according to researchers at Stanford. Although the number of such sites ballooned, the average visits among those people dropped, along with the time spent on each site.

Efforts to educate people about the risk of misinformation after 2016, including content labels and media literacy training, most likely contributed to the decline, the researchers found. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update."

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