The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech September 5, 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 New York Daily News: Straw donor scams steal tax dollars: Public matching fund programs are ripe for rip offs By Tiffany Donnelly .....This spring, we learned of ex-con Lamor Whitehead’s alleged attempt to swindle public money in his failed campaign for Brooklyn borough president. According to federal prosecutors, Whitehead fraudulently declared that his own campaign contributions originated from other people so that he could pump his war chest full of undeserved “matching funds.” Who would have guessed that a convicted felon who served time in Sing-Sing for identity theft would ever lie about the source of his campaign cash? If you pitched it in a writer’s meeting, it would be rejected for being too “on the nose.” Supreme Court SCOTUSblog: (Petitions of the Week) Once-suspended Twitter user argues California violated his First Amendment rights By Kalvis Golde .....Last week the federal government encouraged the justices to review a pair of petitions involving two nearly identical laws in Florida and Texas that seek to regulate how large social media platforms can block, remove, or demonetize user content. Lawmakers in both states passed the bills to address what they perceive as censorship of conservative viewpoints; the platforms countered that the laws violate their own First Amendment rights. This week, we highlight cert petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, a First Amendment challenge against efforts by another populous state, California, to regulate online content. The Courts Politico: GOP salivates at the biggest campaign finance win since Citizens United By Ally Mutnick and Zach Montellaro .....Republicans have waged a decades-long battle to blow up the campaign-finance laws that rein in big-money spending. Now, they are making a play that could end in their biggest victory since the Citizens United ruling in 2010. The GOP is growing increasingly optimistic about their prospects in a little-noticed lawsuit that would allow official party committees and candidates to coordinate freely by removing current spending restrictions. If successful, it would represent a seismic shift in how tens of millions of campaign dollars are spent and upend a well-established political ecosystem for TV advertising. An eventual victory in the lawsuit, filed last November by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, would eliminate the need for House and Senate campaign committees of any party to set up separate operations to make so-called independent expenditures to boost candidates with TV ads. ABC 11: Supporters Defend NC Supreme Court Justice Who Filed Lawsuit Against Judicial Board By Joel Brown .....A First Amendment fight is underway in Raleigh. North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls is suing the state's judicial oversight board in federal court arguing the panel is restricting her right to free speech... Earls filed suit on Tuesday against North Carolina's Judicial Standards Commission. The little-known commission investigates complaints against judges. Earls' suit says the panel threatened disciplinary action for critical comments about the judicial system. In a June interview for an online article in Law 360 -- Earls discussed the lack of diversity among Supreme Court law clerks and the elimination of implicit bias training in the court system. On Aug. 15, the commission informed Earls that her comments may have violated the code of judicial conduct. Washington Post: Arkansas law curbing kids’ social media access blocked for now By Cristiano Lima .....A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked an Arkansas law forcing social media companies to verify users’ ages and requiring that minors get parental consent to set up account. Tech industry trade group NetChoice in June sued to strike down the state law as unconstitutional, arguing it violated users’ First Amendment rights and imposed “onerous obligations” on digital platforms. In granting NetChoice’s request for a preliminary injunction against the law, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Brooks expressed deep reservations about its constitutionality and efficacy. Law Dork: Federal judge bars Tennessee prosecutor from enforcing anti-drag law in Blount Pride case By Chris Geidner .....U.S. District Judge J. Ronnie Greer barred the Blount County, Tennessee, prosecutor and law enforcement in the county from enforcing the state’s new anti-drag law in advance of this weekend’s Blount Pride. In issuing the temporary restraining order against District Attorney General Ryan Desmond, the county sheriff, and the two police chiefs in the county, Greer, a George W. Bush appointee, also barred the officials from “interfering” with the Sept. 2 pride festival “by any means.” Texas Tribune: Federal judge issues temporary restraining order, says Texas law banning drag shows is “likely” unconstitutional By William Melhado .....U.S. District Judge David Hittner temporarily blocked a new state law Thursday from going into effect that would have criminalized sexually-oriented performances in front of children or effectively banned some public drag shows. LGBTQ+ groups sued the Texas attorney general’s office, hoping to stop authorities from enforcing Senate Bill 12, which was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June and was scheduled like most new laws to go into effect Friday. Free Expression Wall Street Journal: Moms for Liberty: ‘We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government’ By Tunku Varadarajan .....In June [the Southern Poverty Law Center] labeled Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment.” It stated in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” that the organization’s “primary goals” are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.” Ms. Justice says that is a lie, and accuses the SPLC of having “put a target on the back of every American parent, every American mom.” She says the designation is “meant to be used as a weapon against us” and asks: “Are any government agencies using the designation as a way for them to do more surveillance on us, or to somehow try to curtail our actions as an organization?” Moms for Liberty may sue. Ms. Justice says the group is “exploring every legal option” and has “retained the best plaintiff-side defamation firm in the United States to hold the SPLC accountable for their hateful targeting of our members.” New York Times: Ban Online Porn for Kids By David French .....If we can impose age limits and age verification offline, we can online as well. If we can zone adult establishments away from kids offline, we can online as well. And if we do these things, we can improve the virtual world for our children without violating the fundamental rights of adults. Our nation tried this before. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which — among other things — criminalized the “knowing” transmission of “obscene or indecent” material online to minors. In 1997, however, the Supreme Court struck down the act’s age limits in Reno v. A.C.L.U., relying in part on a lower court finding that there “is no effective way to determine the identity or the age of a user who is accessing material through email, mail exploders, newsgroups or chat rooms.” The entire opinion is like opening an internet time capsule. The virtual world was so new that the court spent a considerable amount of time explaining what the World Wide Web — when was the last time you heard that phrase? — even was. The internet was so new and the technology so comparatively primitive that the high court, citing a U.S. District Court finding, observed in its opinion that “credit card verification was ‘effectively unavailable to a substantial number of internet content providers.’” Forbes: Why Freedom Of Expression And Academic Freedom Are So Important By Marybeth Gasman .....Knowing that objections to freedom of thought and inquiry can have detrimental implications, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars launched a new project called The Campus Call. This new initiative, which is part of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, brings together college presidents who are fiercely committed to academic freedom and safeguarding the rights of students and faculty to learn, to explore, to engage, and to disagree. These presidents want to “urgently spotlight, uplift, and reemphasize the principles of critical inquiry and civic discourse on their campuses.” The presidents see the effort as key to amplifying “higher education’s role in preparing young people to be the empowered citizens. Online Speech Platforms Forbes: X Lifts Ban On Political Ads By Emma Woollacott .....X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, is planning to scrap its ban on political advertising in the U.S. The move to allow ads from political parties and candidates comes as part of the company's preparations for the 2024 presidential election, with the company's safety team saying that the new policy represents a commitment to free speech. "During elections, X works to get in front of a range of tactics that people use to target the process. To do this we hire the right people, update our policies and evolve our product," says the team in a statement. "Starting in the U.S., we’ll continue to apply specific policies to paid-for promoted political posts. This will include prohibiting the promotion of false or misleading content, including false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election, while seeking to preserve free and open political discourse." Racket News: GoFundMe, Go To Hell By Matt Taibbi .....The online crowdfunding site GoFundMe just shut down a fundraising initiative for The Grayzone, a left-leaning, antiwar site led by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté. Citing what they euphemistically termed “external concerns,” the site froze $90,000 Grayzone raised from 1100 contributors to pay for the reporting of Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed, and Alex Rubenstein. The fundraiser has since moved to a new destination, SpotFund, and already surpassed the amount frozen by GoFundMe. The damage however has been done. GoFundMe is now officially the poster child for politicization of economic services. They prevented a parents group from renting a billboard to publicize Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, froze nearly $8 million in donations to the “Freedom Convoy” Canadian Trucker movement, even wiped out two fundraisers for MintPress. This Grayzone incident is perhaps most loathsome, lacking even a patina of necessity or justification, while serving as a depressingly obvious preview of things to come. Intercept: Meta Overhauls Controversial "Dangerous Organizations" Censorship Policy By Sam Biddle .....The social media giant Meta recently updated the rulebook it uses to censor online discussion of people and groups it deems “dangerous,” according to internal materials obtained by The Intercept. The policy had come under fire in the past for casting an overly wide net that ended up removing legitimate, nonviolent content. The goal of the change is to remove less of this material. In updating the policy, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also made an internal admission that the policy has censored speech beyond what the company intended. Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals,” or DOI, policy is based around a secret blacklist of thousands of people and groups, spanning everything from terrorists and drug cartels to rebel armies and musical acts. For years, the policy prohibited the more than one billion people using Facebook and Instagram from engaging in “praise, support or representation” of anyone on the list. Washington Post (Technology 202): Why a ‘perfect storm’ of misinformation may loom in 2024 By Cristiano Lima .....A majority of researchers expect global misinformation to worsen in 2024, with politicians and social media posing the most serious threats, according to a new survey released Tuesday. The poll, which surveyed almost 300 researchers across 50 countries, found that only a small fraction — 12 percent — think the information environment in their countries will improve next year, while 54 percent said it will deteriorate. The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), the Swiss-based nongovernmental organization behind the survey, said the results demonstrate “significant pessimism” among experts. The findings arrive as platforms including Meta and Elon Musk’s X roll back policies and scale back teams dedicated to combating misinformation, ahead of major elections in the United States, Europe and India. Political Parties New York Times: For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties By Thomas B. Edsall .....One of the most important developments driving political polarization over the past two decades is the growth in small-dollar contributions. Increasing the share of campaign pledges from modest donors has long been a goal of campaign-finance reformers, but it turns out that small donors hold far more ideologically extreme views than those of the average voter. In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years. (Very recently, in part because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and in part because Joe Biden has not been able to raise voter enthusiasm, low-dollar contributions have declined, although they remain a crucial source of cash for candidates.) Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donations grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70. 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." 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. Follow the Institute for Free Speech ‌ ‌ ‌ The Institute for Free Speech | 1150 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 801, Washington, DC 20036 Unsubscribe [email protected] Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by [email protected]