This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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FEC
By Cristiano Lima
.....The Federal Election Commission is poised to inch closer to regulating artificial intelligence in political ads on Thursday, teeing up an early procedural vote on the issue after deadlocking over it in June. But ongoing political disputes may stymie new AI rules.
The six-member commission split along party lines on an earlier AI petition, with some officials expressing concern the FEC did not have the authority to weigh in on the matter.
But the agency is now scheduled to take up an updated version, refiled by the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen. The group is pushing to explicitly ban candidates and political parties from deliberately misrepresenting their opponents in ads through the use of AI.
The move appears likely to succeed, with one of the three Republican holdouts who initially rejected the request signaling their support ahead of the meeting.
FEC Vice Chairman Sean Cooksey told The Technology 202 that now that the advocacy group has “fixed its earlier defects,” he plans to support opening the petition up to public debate. If successful, the vote on Thursday would kick off a two-month comment period on the issue.
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The Courts
By Mary Ellen Klas
.....A federal judge on Wednesday put a permanent halt to a lobbying ban approved by voters in 2018, striking down a provision in the state constitutional amendment that bars officeholders from earning money in their private lives as lobbyists. U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami sided with Miami-Dade County Commissioner René Garcia and Javier Fernández, the mayor of South Miami, who argued that the amendment language was too broad and poorly defined to comply with federal First Amendment protections on free speech. Bloom had imposed a temporary injunction in February and her ruling on Wednesday makes it permanent. The amendment was placed on the 2018 ballot by the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission, a citizen-led group that has the power to recommend changes to the Constitution every 20 years.
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By Caitlin Williams
.....Two teachers’ unions joined six professors in Idaho to bring a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the No Public Funds for Abortion Act (NPFAA), an Idaho law that prohibits the use of public funds to provide, promote, or counsel in favor of abortion. According to a press release from the plaintiffs’ counsel the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the law effectively “censors teaching, discussion, and scholarship about abortion at Idaho’s public universities.”
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By Katelynn Richardson
.....A major First Amendment case on government collusion with Big Tech is scheduled to go before a federal appeals court for oral arguments on Thursday, per the court’s calendar.
The Fifth Circuit will hear the Biden administration’s appeal of a July 4 injunction barring officials across the federal government — including the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI — from communicating with social media platforms for the purposes of censoring protected speech. Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty, who issued the injunction, likened the evidence of government-directed censorship uncovered through the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit challenging the government’s efforts to police misinformation online to an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
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Congress
By The Editorial Board
.....Remember the tempest this year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was found to be targeting some Catholics as “extremists?” The bureau cast it as the work of a single rogue field office. Well, it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public.
That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.
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Nonprofits
By Alex Daniels, Chronicle of Philanthropy
.....A generation ago nonprofit organizations regularly lobbied for legislation and served as advocates on issues. But according to a recent survey, charities are now far more reluctant to seek to influence lawmakers and other policymakers.
The survey, conducted for Independent Sector, a membership organization of nonprofits and grantmakers, found that less than one-third of nonprofits have actively advocated for policy issues or lobbied on specific legislation over the past five years, down from nearly three-quarters of nonprofits in 2000.
And even though nonprofits work on a range of issues that are affected by policy choices, such as funding for the arts and science and policies on hot-button issues like abortion and gun control, less than one-third of nonprofits said they were well-versed in how to legally conduct advocacy campaigns and how much lobbying they were permitted to do. Twenty years ago more than half knew the rules, the survey found.
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