The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech August 3, 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]. In the News The Hill: Twitter’s rebrand is a chance to recommit to free speech, even about abortion By Tiffany Donnelly .....The State Sen. Rachel Hunt (D) is running for lieutenant governor of North Carolina. Her opposition to the state’s recently passed 12-week abortion ban is central to her platform and her decision to run. Hunt wants to explain her views to voters in a video campaign advertisement. However, because she intends to discuss abortion, Twitter, since rebranded as “X,” refuses to allow Hunt to use the site’s content promotion and advertising tools. The platform rejected Hunt’s advertisement in June, admitting that “the mention of abortion advocacy is the issue here.” Providing a glimmer of hope, a Twitter employee told Hunt’s campaign that the platform might have “some good news to share on that front” in the following weeks. It’s been almost two months now. If Elon Musk is genuinely committed to free speech, he should immediately change the policy prohibiting Hunt’s ad and repeal the political ad ban entirely. New from the Institute for Free Speech Institute for Free Speech Urges First Circuit to Strike Down School Board Ban on Criticizing Employees .....The right to criticize public officials and government employees lies at the heart of the First Amendment. Yet, for Hampden parent Shawn McBreairty, such criticism prompted the local school board to silence him. That’s why the Institute for Free Speech has filed an amicus brief urging the First Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a federal district court ruling and declare unconstitutional the Regional School Unit 22 (RSU 22) policy prohibiting speakers at board meetings from criticizing school personnel. In the brief, the Institute argues that the policy violates the First Amendment by discriminating against particular viewpoints and unreasonably restricting public debate. The Institute filed the brief in support of McBreairty, a parent who was removed from an RSU 22 board meeting after attempting to criticize school officials by name. “School board meetings are supposed to give parents and community members a voice in education policy and administration,” said Brett Nolan, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech. “But the school district is manipulating this public forum to shield itself and other school officials from criticism. The First Amendment prohibits that kind of censorship.” In its brief, the Institute contends that the policy cannot survive constitutional scrutiny even under the more permissive rules that apply to speech restrictions in limited public forums. Online Content Moderation By Sarah Fisher .....At present, the Biden administration is engaged in a legal battle due to their past contact with tech companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (now called X) to limit speech related to the 2020 election results, criticisms of COVID-19 measures, stories about Hunter Biden’s extracurricular activities, and more. What critics have called an “Orwellian” suppression of ideas not only restricted false information on these platforms, but also certain truthful or opinion-based viewpoints members of the administration found objectionable. Earlier this month, District Court Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction barring federal departments from interacting with social media corporations. In the midst of this debate over the government’s influence over online content, a new research analysis by Pew Research Center has found that a majority of Americans actually support restrictions related to online speech, particularly regarding the spread of false information and violent content. However, most of the survey respondents agreed that moderation is a role best performed by social media companies themselves, rather than the government. Trump Indictment Federalist: Jack Smith’s Jan 6. Indictments Are An Attack On Political Speech By David Harsanyi .....People keep assuring me the indictments aren’t really about the expression but rather about defrauding the government. Sorry, the entire case is predicated on the things Trump said or believed or didn’t say or didn’t believe. All of it should be protected under the First Amendment. “Spreading lies” — prosecutors leaned on the thesaurus hard, finding about two dozen ways of repeating this fact — or entertaining theories offered by crackpot lawyers, or trying to convince faithless electors to do things that people have been trying to convince faithless electors to do for a long time, are all unethical, not criminal. Wall Street Journal: Another Troubling Trump Indictment By The Editorial Board .....This is a remarkably broad theory of “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” and one with troubling implications far beyond the fate of Mr. Trump. Mr. Smith’s theory seems to be that if a President and his “co-conspirators” are lying, and then take action on that lie, they are defrauding the U.S. This potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a President that a prosecutor deems to be false. You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead. It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor. And it might have criminalized the actions by Al Gore and George W. Bush to contest the Florida election result in 2000. New York Times: Trump Election Charges Set Up Clash of Lies Versus Free Speech By Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman .....Already, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies are setting out the early stages of a legal strategy to counter the accusations, saying that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights are under attack. They say Mr. Trump had every right to express views about election fraud that they say he believed, and still believes, to be true, and that the actions he took or proposed after the election were based on legal advice. The indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs. The Courts Washington Post (Technology 202): Disinfo researchers are under pressure from the right. They’re starting to push back. By Will Oremus .....In a legal brief filed last week, Stanford University and two of its internet researchers blasted a Louisiana federal judge’s order that limited the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with them about online misinformation. Stanford and the researchers, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, claim that U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 ruling repeatedly quoted them as saying things they never said. Those “invented quotations,” they say, helped Doughty paint an inaccurate picture of their role in what Doughty deemed “censorship” of posts about the 2020 election and the covid-19 pandemic. The injunction he imposed “has cast a chill across academia” and violates Stamos and DiResta’s First Amendment rights, they argue... Stanford joins the fray as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is set to consider the Justice Department’s appeal of Doughty’s ruling, which the appeals court put on hold until it reaches a final ruling. Stamos and DiResta aren’t named as defendants in the case. But they feature prominently in the judge’s ruling, which barred government agencies from contact with them. And their filing is the first that takes direct aim at the collateral damage of Doughty’s ruling to the First Amendment rights of academics who study social media. In other words, they say Doughty is doing just what he accuses the Biden administration of doing: suppressing protected political speech. Candidates and Campaigns Politico: The case for more AI in politics By Ben Schreckinger .....[Eric Wilson, managing partner at Startup Caucus, an incubator for Republican campaign tech:] The moral panic around AI, especially in politics, is way overblown. The way it’s going to be integrated into this cycle is very mundane, which is like helping write press releases and social media copy, and just speeding up the process as we’re seeing it in any other industry. The real applications are fundamentally boring and don’t live up to the panic around “Robots are going to take our democracy.” Wired: This Disinformation Is Just for You By Thor Benson .....“Generative AI lowers the financial barrier for creating content that’s tailored to certain audiences,” says Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. “You can tailor it to audiences and make sure the narrative hits on the values and beliefs of those audiences, as well as the strategic part of the narrative.” Rather than producing just a handful of articles a day, Starbird adds, “You can actually write one article and tailor it to 12 different audiences. It takes five minutes for each one of them.” 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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