April 22, 2024

In the News

The Hill: Advocates fear for pro-Palestinian speakers after USC nixes valedictorian’s address

By Lexi Lonas

.....The University of Southern California is under fire after it revoked the right of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian to speak at graduation, revealing what critics say is a free speech double standard and kicking off what’s expected to be a controversial year for commencement addresses...

Others say the university simply wanted to avoid a politically charged event and came up with a subpar excuse to avoid it.

“It just looks like the university changed its mind about having her as a speaker and didn’t want to fess up to the reality that they picked somebody that they now regret picking and instead, wave it off to security concerns. It doesn’t seem credible, frankly,” said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech.

Supreme Court

Matthew Schafer: The Court Might Gut a Key First Amendment Doctrine. Few Even Noticed.

.....In February, the Supreme Court heard arguments over the constitutionality of Texas’ and Florida’s social media laws — laws adopted to prohibit alleged political discrimination online by tech companies.

Court watchers have said the cases could define the future of the internet. That’s scary enough. As Justice Elena Kagan said during the argument, she and her colleagues “are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet.”

But the cases might do much more than that. During oral argument in Moody v. Netchoice, the Florida case, members of the Court raised an issue that wasn’t briefed: whether Netchoice, the industry group challenging the law, could mount what’s called an “overbreadth” challenge to the Florida statute.

Were the Court to roll back the overbreadth doctrine, it would dramatically reshape First Amendment law. The result would limit the ability of individuals to confront sweepingly unconstitutional statutes targeting individuals’ freedom of expression.

Biden Administration

The Federalist: Biden Admin’s Title IX Rewrite Obliterates Female Spaces, Free Speech, And Due Process

By Jordan Boyd

.....The Biden administration’s Department of Education unveiled a sweeping set of rules on Friday that effectively erase protections for sex-based spaces by expanding the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” — a term that’s never mentioned in the original law…

[The regulations] also encroach on parents’ rights and threaten academic free speech by incentivizing schools to censor students and teachers with traditional views on sex and marriage so they don’t lose federal funding.

Congress

AP News: The House votes for possible TikTok ban in the US, but don’t expect the app to go away anytime soon

By Mary Clare Jalonick and Haleluya Hadero

.....The House passed legislation Saturday that would ban TikTok in the United States if the popular social media platform’s China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake within a year, but don’t expect the app to go away anytime soon.

The decision by House Republicans to include TikTok as part of a larger foreign aid package, a priority for President Joe Biden with broad congressional support for Ukraine and Israel, fast-tracked the ban after an earlier version had stalled in the Senate. A standalone bill with a shorter, six-month selling deadline passed the House in March by an overwhelming bipartisan vote as both Democrats and Republicans voiced national security concerns about the app’s owner, the Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd.

The modified measure, passed by a 360-58 vote, now goes to the Senate after negotiations that lengthened the timeline for the company to sell to nine months, with a possible additional three months if a sale is in progress.

Legal challenges could extend that timeline even further. The company has indicated that it would likely go to court to try and block the law if it passes, arguing it would deprive the app’s millions of users of their First Amendment rights.

Free Expression

Wall Street Journal: Progressives, Columbia and the Anti-Israel Protesters

By The Editorial Board

.....Protesters across the country these days claim they are fighting for the rights of Palestinians but show contempt for the rights of those whose lives they disrupt. On Thursday Columbia University President Minouche Shafik had enough. When the protesters who set up a “Gaza solidarity encampment” on the university’s South Lawn ignored repeated warnings to leave, she called in the New York Police Department to have them removed.

Ms. Shafik waited too long to address the problems festering on her campus, and her move came only after she was grilled by Congress on antisemitism on Columbia’s campus. But give her credit for acting. In a statement she explains that the protesters ignored multiple warnings that they were violating university policies.

Other leaders should take heed—especially the Democrats and progressives who run America’s cities and most institutions. In recent weeks similar protests have shut down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, blocked access to Chicago’s airport and interrupted Congressional hearings. They even crashed a fundraiser in New York to heckle President Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Wall Street Journal: Protests Turn Violent at Yale

By Gabriel Diamond

.....Anti-Israel protests escalated to violence at Yale University this weekend, and administrators let it happen. Hundreds of protesters flooded the main campus, pitched 40 tents, blocked Yale’s main dining hall, chanted for the annihilation of Israel, and denounced America.

Identifiably Jewish students found themselves surrounded and cornered by protest mobs. Sahar Tartak, a sophomore who has written for these pages, was poked in the eye with a flagpole and needed hospital treatment. On Friday night the mob cheered as students ripped down the American flag in front of a memorial for fallen soldiers and tried to burn it…

This protest is in clear violation of Yale’s code of conduct, which explicitly forbids protesters from obstructing building entrances or blocking students’ ability to observe an event. But the administration sat on its hands.

KCBS Radio: Ask an Expert: The importance of civil discourse on college campuses

.....KCBS Radio News anchor Matt Bigler spoke with David Primo, Political Science professor at the University of Rochester, he's an expert on free speech on college campuses and teaches the course Disagreement in a Democratic Society.

Online Speech Platforms

Politico (Digital Bridge): We need to calm down about AI and elections

By Mark Scott

.....[E]veryone appears to be freaking out about AI’s influence on the increasingly polarized voting populace. The theory goes that the technology’s rampant advances — coupled with the ability of bad actors to use it to peddle synthetic falsehoods across mostly unregulated social media — make 2024 ripe for AI-powered skullduggery...

To that, I say: sure. If you look at the problem from a very micro level. But after talking to more than 30 politicians, policymakers, national security officials and disinformation experts — from many of the countries holding elections this year — the resounding question is: Where is the proof? ...

For all the potential harm this technology may represent, no one has yet connected it to unfair voter outcomes that skewed an election in favor of one politician over another. As we’re almost four months into 2024...it’s a legitimate question to ask about quantifiable evidence that AI is the harm that many say it is. I am a lapsed business reporter. So my adage remains: Politicians lie, numbers don’t. And, so far, no one has successfully demonstrated that AI has harmed a country’s electoral process in such a way that has broken underlying democratic institutions and processes. Might that happen? Totally. But as of April 18, 2024, we’re still in the “wait and see” stage.

Washington Post: As Meta flees politics, campaigns rely on new tricks to reach voters

By Naomi Nix, Michael Scherer and Jeremy B. Merrill

.....In February, Meta announced that it would stop recommending political content from accounts users don’t follow on Instagram or its upstart text-based app Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri warned last year that Threads would not “encourage” politics and “hard news” on the platform because it wasn’t worth the scrutiny.

The pullback has affected major news outlets, dramatically impacting engagement.

The 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook and 58 percent of interactions on Instagram between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024, according to a data analysis by The Post. Right-leaning news outlets such as Newsmax, the Daily Wire, Fox News and Breitbart suffered bigger declines than their mainstream counterparts on Instagram, but no such partisan split occurred on Facebook, the analysis found.

“It’s just an interesting moment,” said Natalie Stroud, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies social media. “There seems to be just a pattern away [from news and politics on social media], and it just makes me think: Where will people go for this information? Or will they just go without it?”

Research suggests that social media draws an “inadvertent audience” to news about current events, increasing users’ knowledge about politics. One 2020 study found that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm election decreased users’ factual understanding of the news and political polarization.

The States and D.C.

New York Times: N.R.A. to Overhaul Charity It’s Accused of Using as a ‘Piggy Bank’

By Danny Hakim

.....The National Rifle Association reached a settlement on Wednesday with the District of Columbia’s attorney general, agreeing to make governance changes that would curtail its use of millions of dollars raised by an affiliated charity accused of mishandling tax-deductible donations.

For years, the N.R.A. made liberal use of the foundation’s coffers to prop up its own dwindling fortunes. The attorney general’s office said the practice illegally drew on charitable donations, which are not supposed to be used for political activity.

Politico: Another Eric Adams contributor pleads guilty to straw donor scheme

By Joe Anuta and Jeff Coltin

.....One of six people involved in a straw donor scheme related to the 2021 campaign of Mayor Eric Adams pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to make illegal campaign donations.

Under the terms of the agreement Shamsuddin Riza, who owns a construction company and runs in Harlem political circles, will be sentenced to three years probation, and agreed not to organize any political fundraising events for those three years…

In the indictment unsealed by Bragg in July, Riza and the five others were accused of conspiring to reimburse contributors to the mayor’s 2021 campaign. Known in election parlance as “straw donors,” the scheme allegedly took advantage of the city’s public financing program, which multiplied a portion of each donation eight-fold.