March 25, 2024

The Courts

USA Today: Censorship or safety? US Supreme Court to consider Wyoming election buffer zone challenge

By Cy Neff

.....The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a Wyoming-born First Amendment challenge to the state’s buffer zones restricting campaigning around polling sites.

The lawsuit claims that Wyoming’s Election Day buffer zone, which prevents campaigning within 300 feet of any polling place, creates ‘zones of censorship,’ violating federal precedent and the First Amendment.

According to Stephen Klein, a Washington D.C.-based attorney representing Cheyenne resident and plaintiff John Frank, Wyoming’s buffer zone law goes against the precedent set in the 1992 Supreme Court case Burson v Freeman, which found 100-foot political buffer zones to be constitutional.

“I don’t think it was ever meant to be as extensive as it is. The Election Day Zone is 300 feet or 100 yards in Wyoming, which is three times the radius that was upheld in Burson,” Klein said.

Politico: Judge permits Gaetz, Greene to sue California cities that canceled their events

By Kyle Cheney

.....A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene to sue two California cities that canceled their political events in 2021.

But the judge excoriated the two pro-Trump firebrands for attempting to blame the cancellation on a slew of liberal advocacy groups — from the NAACP to the League of Women Voters to LULAC, who the pair accused of conspiring with Anaheim and Riverside, Calif., to shut down their planned rallies.

The lawsuit by the two GOP lawmakers is “utterly devoid of any specifics plausibly alleging such an agreement,” wrote U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera in a 22-page opinion, calling it “both legally and literally, a conspiracy theory that relies purely on conjecture.”

In fact, he said, Gaetz and Greene had attempted with their lawsuit what they accused the groups of doing to them: seeking to punish political rivals for speaking out against them.

Wall Street Journal: Gender Ideology Invades the Foster Care System

By Sierra Dawn McClain

.....State agencies in the Pacific Northwest are deeming people unfit to be foster or adoptive parents unless they pledge to abide by new orthodoxies on gender and sexuality…

The DeGrosses on Friday filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that the agency is violating their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and free speech.

NLRB

New York Times: The A.C.L.U. Said a Worker Used Racist Tropes and Fired Her. But Did She?

By Jeremy W. Peters

.....Did her language add up to racism? Or was she just speaking harshly about bosses who happened to be Black? That question is the subject of an unusual unfair-labor-practice case brought against the A.C.L.U. by the National Labor Relations Board, which has accused the organization of retaliating against Ms. Oh.

A trial in the case wrapped up this week in Washington, and a judge is expected to decide in the next few months whether the A.C.L.U. was justified in terminating her.

If the A.C.L.U. loses, it could be ordered to reinstate her or pay restitution.

The heart of the A.C.L.U.’s defense — arguing for an expansive definition of what constitutes racist or racially coded speech — has struck some labor and free-speech lawyers as peculiar, since the organization has traditionally protected the right to free expression, operating on the principle that it may not like what someone says, but will fight for the right to say it.

The case raises some intriguing questions about the wide swath of employee behavior and speech that labor law protects — and how the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights organization finds itself on the opposite side of that law, arguing that those protections should not apply to its former employee…

[T]o critics of the A.C.L.U., Ms. Oh’s case is a sign of how far the group has strayed from its core mission — defending free speech — and has instead aligned itself with a progressive politics that is intensely focused on identity.

Candidates and Campaigns

The Guardian: US politicians exploit loophole to skirt campaign finance rules, study finds

By Alice Herman

.....A study published in Election Law Journal reveals politicians’ widespread exploitation of a loophole to skirt the law barring campaigns from coordinating with outside spending groups.

It’s a strategy that takes place not in smoke-filled rooms or encrypted chats, but out in the open.

Campaigns leave a directive to groups on their public-facing websites describing the kind of targeted advertising that they want, which outside spending groups then use to craft advertisements on their behalf. Around the text on their website is a literal red box – flagging committees to pay attention.

Given its prevalence, examples of red-boxing are easy to find.

Online Speech Platforms

The Atlantic: It’s Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media’s Misinformation Problem

By Scott Duke Kominers and Jesse Shapiro

.....We’re Harvard economists who study social media and platform design. (One of us, Scott Duke Kominers, is also a research partner at the crypto arm of a16z, a venture-capital firm with investments in social platforms, and an adviser to Quora.) Our research offers a perhaps counterintuitive solution to disagreements about moderation: Platforms should give up on trying to prevent the spread of information that is simply false, and focus instead on preventing the spread of information that can be used to cause harm. These are related issues, but they’re not the same.

The Hill: Instagram moves to limit political content

By Tara Suter

.....Instagram has moved to limit political content, with users now having to go into their settings on the app to turn the limiting feature off.

Users of the popular social media platform now have to go into their settings under “[c]ontent preferences,” click “[p]olitical content,” and choose the option to not “limit political content from people you don’t follow,” or else Instagram will limit political content from those the user doesn’t follow by default.

Instagram announced back in February that it would no longer proactively recommend political content.

The States

Center Square (California): California proposes restricting 'influential' anonymous online speech

By Kenneth Schrupp

.....An influential California state legislator is proposing that social media companies restrict large-scale anonymous online free speech by requiring social media accounts with more than 25,000 followers provide personal identifying information.

Under the proposed bill, California government attorneys would be authorized to sue companies that fail to seek verification, which in the case of users with more than 100,000 followers would require government-issued identification. 

Under SB 1228, authored by State Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista, social media companies would be required to verify “influential” users with 25,000 to 100,000 followers through their names, telephone numbers, and email addresses. Social media companies would be required to verify “Highly influential” users with more than 100,000 followers via their government-issued identification. 

Washington Examiner: Loudoun County School Board members appear to hate free speech

By Stephanie Lundquist-Arora

.....On Thursday, Democratic-endorsed [Loudon County] school board member April Chandler outlined more ways they might restrict parental input. Claiming that these ideas have precedent in Virginia, she raised the following for the board’s consideration: allowing only 20 minutes for public comment, requiring that members of the public speak only once on a topic, cutting the microphone if speakers become too emotional, requesting that speakers first take their problems to the superintendent before bringing them to the board, and requiring speakers to submit their comments to the chairwoman, who would then determine if the comments were fit to be made public.