This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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In the News
.....Ed. note: Institute for Free Speech founder and former FEC Chair Bradley A. Smith speaks to Scripps News Tonight about presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's unique fundraising plan.
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By Tiffany Donnelly
.....Labels like “antigovernment,” “radical,” and “domestic extremist” are increasingly weaponized against ideological adversaries. Instead of debating the merits of ideas, it is easier to tar and feather speakers. It’s a cheap, lazy tactic designed to intimidate and silence disfavored groups to prevent them from exercising their First Amendment rights. Anyone who cares about free speech should ignore characterizations that make routine political disagreements seem “dangerous” and worthy of government attention.
Unfortunately, the federal government is listening to voices that employ these speech-squashing tactics.
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Congress
By Houston Keene
.....Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul plans to introduce a bill to protect Americans from the Biden administration violating their First Amendment rights.
Fox News Digital has learned that Paul is expected to propose the Free Speech Protection Act on Tuesday, which would impose harsh penalties on federal employees and contractors who leverage their positions to attack speech protected under the First Amendment.
The bill would empower American citizens to sue the government and executive branch officials who violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, according to Paul’s office…
Paul’s office said the Free Speech Protection Act would mandate the frequent publication of and public access to reports on communications between an executive branch agency and a content provider. It bars agencies from using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions to stop the disclosure of illegal communications.
Paul’s bill also makes sure federal grant money does not go to entities that seek to label media outlets as sources of disinformation or misinformation, and ends several authorities and programs that the senator’s office says threaten Americans’ constitutional rights.
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By Cristiano Lima
.....In April 2019, Clarke introduced an influential proposal with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) to require companies to vet their algorithms and automated systems, including those in AI tools, for bias. While the bill has not been signed into law, it has remained a major factor in negotiations around AI policy in Congress.
I caught up with Clarke recently to get her thoughts on the uptick in activity around AI regulation in Washington. Here are the highlights:
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The Courts
By Bret Stephens
.....Judge Doughty’s order has flaws, including, it seems, some dubious assertions of fact that need to be closely investigated. And the broadness of the preliminary injunction is also a practical issue.
Still, the order is a triumph for civil liberties. It also ought to be considered a victory for liberals, insofar as liberals have historically been suspicious of Big Tech and the big national-security state — cooperating, as alleged in this case — to suppress the speech of people whose views they deem dangerous.
But in one of the stranger inversions of recent politics, it’s mostly conservatives who are cheering — and liberals who are decrying — the ruling.
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By Ron Paul
.....While much of the lawsuit concerns COVID censorship, some of the components revolve around efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. The effort to suppress and discredit the story may have influenced the election. Some Biden voters would have voted differently had they had full access to the information.
The suppression of the truth about COVID and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story were both justified as serving a “higher good.” …
Reading the emails between government officials and employees of big tech companies shows that government officials clearly believed they had every right to tell these private companies how to run their businesses.
The government officials even “reminded” them that the companies were in danger of having increased regulations imposed on them by the White House and Congress.
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Donor Privacy
By Heather Lauer
.....Alarm bells are ringing in the nonprofit community after the recent news that charitable giving fell in America in 2022...
In today’s age of social media-fueled cancel culture, Americans are rediscovering the importance of privacy. Many will not get involved in their communities if doing so puts their privacy at risk or, worse, puts a target on their backs. No one should endure harassment and retaliation at their homes, workplaces, on online because of their giving choices.
Most charitable donations are reported to the IRS but kept confidential from the public. At least that’s how it is supposed to work. Unfortunately, federal law and many states fail to safeguard sensitive nonprofit donor information such as the names, home addresses, and employers of those who give.
Leaks, hacks, and extralegal demands from government officials have resulted in the public exposure of numerous charities’ donor records in recent years. Often, these acts appear politically motivated. Take, for example, the hacking of a crowdfunding platform used to support the 2022 Canadian truckers’ protest and the invasive reporting that followed. Or the New York Attorney General Office’s leak of the donor records to Nikki Haley’s nonprofit, Stand for America.
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Free Expression
By Toby Young
.....When I got a message from PayPal last year telling me my personal account had been closed, my initial reaction was shame. Being deplatformed by a financial-services company, whether a bank or a payment processor, is a mark of Cain. You wonder what you’ve done to deserve being cast out in this way. The last thing you feel like doing is drawing attention to it, not least because it might lead to losing your other bank accounts.
When I discovered that PayPal had also closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic, both organisations I run, that initial wave of embarrassment was replaced by anger. And after going through the internal appeals processes, I decided to launch a public campaign to get the accounts reinstated. This worked, but I haven’t used PayPal since. Meanwhile, the Free Speech Union has been lobbying the UK Treasury for the past nine months to put a stop to this sinister new form of cancel culture.
Based on my own experience, I reckon the debanking phenomenon is far more widespread than we’ve been led to believe – mainly because the majority of people it has happened to are too embarrassed to talk about it. If I didn’t have a public profile and friends in parliament, I probably would have kept quiet about it, too.
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The Media
By Jeremy Barr and Will Sommer
.....Fox News, which recently settled two separate high-profile legal challenges for approximately $800 million, is now facing a defamation and false-light lawsuit from a man who said the network presented him as a “scapegoat” for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Ray Epps attended the pro-Trump rallies in Washington in January 2021 but was not among the people found to have breached the Capitol building and has not been charged for his conduct. In subsequent weeks, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson highlighted a video clip of the Arizona man outside the Capitol to suggest that Epps might have been a government informant — a notion that Epps and the FBI have strongly denied...
The lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware, claims that Fox — and Carlson — knew that Epps was almost definitely not a federal agent but chose to disregard that knowledge, therefore arguing that the network acted with actual malice, the standard necessary to win a defamation case against a public entity.
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Political Parties
.....A new report released today by the American Political Science Association (APSA) and Protect Democracy, More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy, identifies how today’s political parties are exacerbating many of the country’s central political problems. Skepticism of political parties is a central feature of American political culture and only about 11% of Americans express high confidence in political parties – igniting APSA’s desire to identify why. Ultimately, the research supports a surprising conclusion: there’s a near-consensus among scholars that healthy political parties are essential to a stable democracy, and without change our politics will likely continue to deteriorate...
Key insights from the report include:
- Features of the current campaign environment, from campaign finance regulations to changes in media, have made it harder for political parties to fulfill their roles.
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Fundraising
By Alex Baltzegar
.....An investigative journalist from North Carolina, Stephen Horn, has made a significant discovery in the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database, revealing a scheme to potentially “launder fraudulent political donations” through multiple leftwing organizations, including ActBlue.
Horn and two other volunteers, Kelley Lane and “Steve,” unearthed evidence of two Raleigh residents whose names and addresses were employed to record substantial amounts of money donated to Democratic organizations.
However, a perplexing twist emerged when both individuals emphatically stated their inability to contribute such exorbitant sums.
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Online Speech Platforms
By Gabe Kaminsky
.....An ex-Twitter executive behind the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story suggested a Department of Homeland Security advisory committee "meet with" a group covertly blacklisting conservative media, documents show.
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The States
.....Backers of an effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system violated campaign finance rules and obscured the source of their funding, including forming a church that could have allowed donors to gain tax advantages for their contributions while skirting disclosure mandates, a complaint alleges.
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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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The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the political rights to free speech, press, assembly, and petition guaranteed by the First Amendment. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org.
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