The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech May 16, 2023 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. DOJ Washington Post: Durham report sharply criticizes FBI’s 2016 Trump campaign probe By Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein .....Special counsel John Durham has issued a long-awaited report that sharply criticizes the FBI for investigating the 2016 Trump campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” — a conclusion that may fuel rather than end partisan debate about politicization within the Justice Department and FBI. Congress Washington Post ("Technology 202"): The CEO behind ChatGPT is testifying. Here’s what to expect. By Cristiano Lima .....Senators said ahead of Tuesday’s hearing that they plan to press [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman, whose AI-driven chatbot has recently exploded in popularity, about how such tools may undermine data privacy, intellectual property, competition and U.S. democracy itself… Lawmakers said they plan to explore how tools like ChatGPT can both inadvertently produce misinformation, including a phenomenon known as hallucination where AI concocts a false fact seemingly out of thin air, as well as how they can power disinformation, such as via deepfakes... With the 2024 election looming, some lawmakers said the use of AI by federal campaigns to generate ads is looming large in their minds. Ahead of the hearing, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced a companion to a House bill that would require campaigns to feature a disclaimer if they use AI to generate a political ad. “We must implement rules of the road including stronger disclosure laws that account for misleading AI-generated content in political advertisements,” Klobuchar said in a statement. Hawley said he’s also concerned about AI’s “potential control over information to voters,” including the potential for “political bias” in the responses that tools like ChatGPT show voters. The Courts Bloomberg Law: Elon Musk Loses Appeal of ‘Twitter Sitter’ Dispute With SEC By Bob Van Voris .....A federal appeals court rejected Elon Musk’s challenge to his 2018 agreement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that requires him to have his Twitter posts about Tesla Inc. screened. The Manhattan court on Monday ruled against Musk’s free speech claims just days after a three-judge panel heard arguments in the case on Thursday. Read the ruling here. Washington Examiner: Ron DeSantis calls Disney's First Amendment argument in lawsuit 'ridiculous' By Jack Birle .....Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) criticized Disney's claims of a First Amendment violation in their lawsuit against him and other Florida officials, arguing it is "ridiculous" to say it protects "corporate welfare." The Florida governor spoke about the state's back-and-forth struggle with the entertainment giant in an interview with the American Conservative published on Monday, arguing the legislative action to restructure Disney's central Florida district was not a violation of protected speech. "They didn’t do anything to touch Disney’s free speech rights. Did they pull ABC’s broadcast license? Did they say Disney can’t speak out about anything? Of course not. They took a government that had been authorized by the state of Florida that, yes, had been basically corrupted by Disney’s influence and run by Disney, and they put accountability on it,” DeSantis said to the outlet. “I mean, the idea you have a First Amendment right to corporate welfare or having a local government that you basically control with no accountability is ridiculous,” he added. Online Speech Platforms Wall Street Journal: Help! My Political Beliefs Were Altered by a Chatbot! By Christopher Mims .....When we ask ChatGPT or another bot to draft a memo, email, or presentation, we think these artificial-intelligence assistants are doing our bidding. A growing body of research shows that they also can change our thinking—without our knowing. One of the latest studies in this vein, from researchers spread across the globe, found that when subjects were asked to use an AI to help them write an essay, that AI could nudge them to write an essay either for or against a particular view, depending on the bias of the algorithm. Performing this exercise also measurably influenced the subjects’ opinions on the topic, after the exercise. “You may not even know that you are being influenced,” says Mor Naaman, a professor in the information science department at Cornell University, and the senior author of the paper. He calls this phenomenon “latent persuasion.” Scam PACs New York Times: How to Raise $89 Million in Small Donations, and Make It Disappear By David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr .....A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits. The phone rings. The caller knows your name, and opens with a dad joke. He is asking for donations, for a group that helps the police. This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice. And like “Frank Wallace,” the American Police Officers Alliance is not what it seems. In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting. In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system. Candidates and Campaigns Daily Beast: How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Campaign Cash for Her Marathon Habit By Sam Brodey .....The Boston trip was far from the first time that Sinema has appeared to fuse a donor get-together onto a personal racing trip allowing her to write off travel costs. On at least six total occasions since 2019, Sinema has participated in a race while engaging in fundraising activity—and covering expenses—in the area of the competition, according to a review of public campaign finance and competition records… According to campaign finance experts, Sinema may be following the letter of that rule, but is pushing into a gray area by appearing to tie legitimate campaign activity to unrelated personal pursuits. “Tacking some personal activities on to a fundraising trip is generally going to be fine,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented. “But this appears to be the inverse—tacking fundraisers on to personal trips to justify the use of campaign funds to cover the costs.” That athletes typically train and plan for big races, like Boston, months or even years in advance makes it highly unlikely that Sinema’s fundraising activity was scheduled as the priority, said Fischer. “The FEC generally isn’t going to scrutinize this kind of spending,” he said. “But at the same time, I doubt any FEC commissioners would declare that a candidate may travel anywhere they want using donor funds, as long as they ask another donor for more money while there.” Saurav Ghosh, an attorney with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, agreed. “In a world where officeholders are really scrupulous about not only following rules to the letter but to the spirit, she wouldn’t be using campaign funds to pay for these things,” he said. Free Expression Atlantic: What Happens When Free-Speech Absolutists Flinch By Gal Beckerman .....Since the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, much of the Western world has become squeamish about Russian art. Tchaikovsky would not be played. Russian literature was kept high on the shelf. Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Ballet was disinvited from touring abroad. Such boycotts have only increased in intensity, and in ways that demonstrate how wartime assaults on freedom can ripple far outside the conflict zone—where the sound of war is not that of bombs detonating but of piercing silence. Now the impulse to censor anyone Russian has arrived in the United States, at a venue that is designed to—of all things—champion and promote freedom of speech and expression: PEN America’s annual World Voices festival. It has also led, quite precipitously, to the writer Masha Gessen’s decision to resign as the vice president of PEN’s board of directors. New York Sun: PEN America’s Claim That Thousands of Books Are Banned by Schools Is Largely Fiction: Report By Scott Norvell .....A new study by the conservative Heritage Foundation has found that a liberal group’s assertion that thousands of books have been banned by school libraries across the country during the 2021-2022 school year is wildly inaccurate. The report by senior research fellow Jay Greene at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy suggests that PEN America’s claim that 2,532 books were banned — primarily by conservative-leaning administrators — is off by as much as three-quarters. Combing through the online catalogs of districts cited by the writers’ advocacy group, Heritage found that 74 percent of the books supposedly banned were still available in those districts, and many of them were checked out at the time Heritage did the survey. The Intercept: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr By Sam Biddle .....Dataminr, an “official partner” of Twitter, alerted a federal law enforcement agency to pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request. Internal emails show that the U.S. Marshals Service received regular alerts from Dataminr, a company that persistently monitors social media for corporate and government clients, about the precise time and location of both ongoing and planned abortion rights demonstrations. The emails show that Dataminr flagged the social media posts of protest organizers, participants, and bystanders, and leveraged Dataminr’s privileged access to the so-called firehose of unrestricted Twitter data to monitor constitutionally protected speech. “This is a technique that’s ripe for abuse, but it’s not subject to either legislative or judicial oversight,” said Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. The data collection alone, however, can have a deleterious effect on free speech. Mary Pat Dwyer, the academic program director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University, told The Intercept, “The more it’s made public that law enforcement is gathering up this info broadly about U.S. residents and citizens, it has a chilling effect on whether people are willing to express themselves and attend protests and plan protests.” The States New Hampshire Bulletin: Bill to boost political finance transparency heads to Sununu’s desk By Ethan DeWitt .....A bill to increase oversight of political advocacy organizations in New Hampshire is headed to Gov. Chris Sununu’s desk. House Bill 195 would expand which organizations would count as political advocacy organizations, a designation that requires them to register with the Secretary of State’s Office and report receipts and expenditures. Currently, the label applies only to organizations that spend $5,000 toward advocacy for or against a candidate or party in an election cycle. The bill would lower that threshold to organizations that spend $2,500 or more. The bill passed the Senate unanimously last week; it passed the House in March, also by a unanimous vote... As originally introduced, HB 195 sought to subject more organizations to disclosure requirements. The original bill also required campaign finance disclosures for organizations that provide “communications that refer to a clearly identified candidate or candidates or the success or defeat of a measure or measures.” That provision was taken out after some organizations, including the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a right-leaning think tank, raised concerns that the move could require them to submit disclosures for providing information about candidates ahead of elections. Wirepoints: ‘Anti-doxing’ bill passed by Illinois General Assembly will punish legitimate advocacy and stifle constitutionally protected speech By Mark Glennon .....An awful, unconstitutional piece of legislation that should have been opposed by Democrats and Republicans alike passed unanimously in the Illinois House and Senate. It now goes to Gov. JB Pritzker for signature. The only significant opposition came from the ACLU of Illinois. They are right to oppose it. The bill, HB 2954, would create civil liability for doxing. “Doxing” is commonly used to mean publication, usually on the internet, of personal information about somebody, especially somebody’s individual identity and whereabouts, with the intent of harassing, shaming or taking revenge on that person. But HB 2954 is far too broad. If Pritzker signs it, the law will stifle constitutionally protected speech and the bill, itself, will be a tool for political abuse. Read an article you think we would be interested in? 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