The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech April 17, 2024 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 Penn Live: A bill in the Pennsylvania house would stifle free speech with paperwork By Tiffany Donnelly .....Want to spend $10 to promote your Facebook post, make a poster for your window, or run off a few flyers at Office Depot to support a school board candidate? Under a proposal moving through the legislature, you’d have to fill out a complicated form and file it with the government—which would then display the form on the internet. Last week, Pennsylvania’s state House State Government Committee advanced the dangerous, anti-free speech bill guaranteed to invite litigation paid for by Keystone State taxpayers. House Bill 1472 would deter average Pennsylvanians out of speaking out about candidates by forcing them to navigate the bureaucracy. Under the bill, someone who spends any amount on such advocacy would be forced to comply with onerous campaign finance reporting requirements or risk being fined. The reporting threshold is so low that even the ten cents you paid your local library to print a single page that you display on a window could trigger the reporting. New from the Institute for Free Speech Free Speech Arguments – Episode 7: Fischer v. U.S. .....Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 16, 2024... Question presented: Did the D.C. Circuit err in construing 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) (“Witness, Victim, or Informant Tampering”), which prohibits obstruction of congressional inquiries and investigations, to include acts unrelated to investigations and evidence? Supreme Court Reason: Most Justices Seem Skeptical of Charging Capitol Rioters With Obstructing an Official Proceeding By Jacob Sullum .....Justice Samuel Alito, who said the Court needs to understand "the outer reaches of this statute under [Prelogar's] interpretation," elaborated on one of Gorsuch's hypotheticals. Suppose that during oral arguments in this very case, he said, "five people get up, one after the other, and they shout either 'Keep the January 6th insurrectionists in jail!' or 'Free the January 6th patriots!' And as a result of this, our police officers have to remove them forcibly from the courtroom. And let's say we have to delay the proceeding for five minutes." In those circumstances, Alito said, "an advocate might lose his or her train of thought and not provide the best argument." Since such a protest arguably "impedes" or "influences" an official proceeding, he wondered, would it fall under Section 1512(c)(2)? Even if you "look at some of the broader dictionary definitions and adopt a broader understanding" of the requisite conduct, Prelogar said, "there would be the backstop of needing to prove corrupt intent." For example, she said, if someone mistakenly thought he was exercising his right to freedom of speech by shouting during a judicial proceeding, he would not have the necessary "consciousness of wrongdoing." By implication, however, he could be guilty of this felony if he understood that he had no right to behave that way. The Courts Courthouse News: Ex-congressman asks 11th Circuit to toss six-figure campaign finance penalty By Kayla Goggin .....Former Republican Congressman David Rivera took his fight against a six-figure campaign finance penalty to the 11th Circuit on Tuesday, asking the panel to let a jury decide whether he made campaign contributions in another person’s name to undermine a Democratic rival in a Florida election. Rivera’s attorney told a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appellate court that a Miami federal judge ignored conflicting evidence in siding with the Federal Election Commission and ordering Rivera to pay a $456,000 fine for violating the Federal Election Campaign Act. Arguing on behalf of Rivera, attorney Thomas Hunker of Hunker Paxton Appeals & Trials said the FEC failed to satisfy some of the law’s requirements in pursuing what was the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the agency on a non-corporate individual. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Can the Government Say: If You Want to Sell Us These Products, You Must Answer Our Questions About Them? By Eugene Volokh .....From today's dissent from denial of rehearing en banc in Book People, Inc. v. Wong, written by Judge James Ho and joined by Jones, Smith, Duncan, and Engelhardt: Ars Technica: Judge halts Texas probe into Media Matters’ reporting on X By Ashley Belanger .....A judge has preliminarily blocked what Media Matters for America (MMFA) described as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempt to "rifle through" confidential documents to prove that MMFA fraudulently manipulated X (formerly Twitter) data to ruin X's advertising business, as Elon Musk has alleged. After Musk accused MMFA of publishing reports that Musk claimed were designed to scare advertisers off X, Paxton promptly launched his own investigation into MMFA last November. Congress New York Times: Secret Rift Over Data Center Fueled Push to Expand Reach of Surveillance Program By Charlie Savage .....A hidden dispute over whether a data center for cloud computing must cooperate with a warrantless surveillance program prompted the House last week to add a mysterious provision to a bill extending the program, according to people familiar with the matter… In recent days, for example, the office of a leading privacy-minded senator, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has circulated a warning that the provision could be used to conscript someone with access to a journalist’s laptop to extract communications between that journalist and a hypothetical foreign source who was targeted for intelligence. “Even if a law is pitched as addressing a specific situation, history shows that intelligence agencies will use every inch of authority Congress provides to spy on Americans,” Mr. Wyden said in a statement, calling the provision “a breathtaking expansion of Section 702, which should terrify anyone who cares about Americans’ rights.” Online Speech Platforms Washington Post: They criticized Israel. This Twitter account upended their lives. By Pranshu Verma .....Dani Marzouca was in bed trying to sleep when the phone started buzzing. An organization dedicated to publicly rebuking critics of Israel had posted on X a clip of Marzouca declaring that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” The 20-second clip, from an Instagram live stream, rapidly garnered more than 1 million views. Soon, the group, StopAntisemitism, was calling Marzouca a “Hamas terrorist supporter” and tagging their employer, the branding firm Terakeet of Syracuse, N.Y. Hundreds of people commented on X, LinkedIn and email, including one who asked: “Do you really have antisemites like this working for you, @Terakeet?” Within a day, Marzouca was fired — a development Terakeet announced as a reply to StopAntisemitism’s Twitter thread, 15 hours after the original post. Fortune: Some ex-TikTok employees say the social media service worked closely with its China-based parent despite claims of independence By Alexandra Sternlicht .....Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a senior data scientist from April to September in 2022, said TikTok concealed the involvement of its Chinese owner during his employment. When hired, Turner initially reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. But later that year, after the company announced a major initiative to store TikTok’s U.S. user data only in the U.S, Turner was reassigned—on paper, at least—to an American manager in Seattle, he says. But Turner says a human resources representative revealed during a video conference call that he would, in reality, continue to work with the ByteDance executive. The stealth chain of command contradicted what TikTok’s executives had said about the company’s independence from ByteDance, Turner says. Archive.today link The Media NPR: NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism By David Folkenflik .....NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset. Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported. Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump. Wall Street Journal: New York Times Bosses Seek to Quash Rebellion in the Newsroom By Alexandra Bruell .....The New York Times is investigating itself. Over the past several weeks, Charlotte Behrendt, a top Times editor in charge of probing workplace issues in the newsroom, has summoned close to 20 employees for interviews to determine whether staffers leaked confidential information related to Gaza war coverage to another media outlet. It is the latest internal crisis at the Times, where management has been at odds with factions of the newsroom over union negotiations and coverage of sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice. The Atlantic: Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls By Richard Stengel .....According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option. Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls. Archive.today link 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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