The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech May 22, 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 Wall Street Journal (LTE): You Shouldn’t Need the Courage of Your Convictions to Speak By David Keating .....Your editorial “Campus Protesters, Unmasked” (May 13) glosses over the importance of anonymous speech, which the First Amendment protects. The Ohio law that you cite takes a reasonable approach, allowing protesters to wear masks if they obey the law, but imposing stiffer penalties for committing a crime while masked. While it’s fine to encourage protesters to show “the courage of their convictions” by demonstrating unmasked, not all speakers are courageous, and some would be foolish to speak publicly. For example, Americans with relatives in China who protest the Communist regime should wear masks. Hartford Courant: CT Supreme Court rules that state ban on some political ads infringes on political free speech By Edmund H. Mahony .....The state Supreme Court on Monday overturned a campaign finance law that limits who candidates can criticize in political ads, giving a win in a free speech case to two Republican legislators fined for attacking former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s fiscal policy a decade ago. Election Law Blog: With Both Sides Resting in Trump Hush Money Trial, Whether Donald Trump Committed Felonies is Uncertain, Likely Depending on the Jury Instructions and How Appeals Courts Will Interpret the Law By Rick Hasen .....The exclusion of Brad Smith’s testimony about FEC practices (such as when the payment to Daniels would have been reported—if after the election, then this could not have mattered for affecting the outcome of the election) could also be grounds for appeal. The Courts Courthouse News: DC transit authority ban on controversial ads found to violate First Amendment By Ryan Knappenberger .....A federal judge ruled Tuesday in favor of a Christian nonprofit in a First Amendment suit against Washington’s transit authority, blocking a policy that prohibited the group’s ad campaign. The suit, brought by Texas-based nonprofit WallBuilders in December 2023, challenged a decision by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to reject an advertising campaign seeking to promote the founders’ Christian faith. WallBuilders claimed two of the transit authority’s policies, Guidelines 9 and 12, violated its First Amendment rights. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, a Barack Obama appointee, found the most issue with Guideline 9, specifically its vague language and the transit authority’s seeming lack of consistency in applying it. Guideline 9 prohibits advertisements intended to influence people on an issue where there are “varying opinions.” ... Howell pointed to three examples of approved ads cited by WallBuilders: an Instacart ad promoting the Plan B contraceptive pill; a public service ad from D.C. Health promoting Covid-19 vaccines; and a Power to the Patients ad advocating for lower and more transparent hospital pricing. She found that each example related to an issue with “varying opinions,” yet were still approved by the transit authority. Texas Scorecard: Federal Appeals Court Halts Palo Pinto County’s Rules Against Political Signage By Luca Cacciatore .....A federal appeals court halted a Texas county’s new rules restricting political signage just one day before early voting started for the May 28 primary runoff election. The three-judge panel found Sunday that Palo Pinto County Conservatives and Grassroots Mineral Wells, led by local activist Johanna Miller, likely demonstrated how parts of the new orders could violate the First Amendment. Among the controversial changes were the prohibition of political signs when an election is not upcoming, the limitation of the signs to under 36 square feet, the restriction of candidates to six signs each, and a ban on the signs displayed on permanent structures. The county also prohibited so-called electioneering by canvassers on sidewalks or driveways outside designated areas. Congress Wall Street Journal: Buy This Legislation or We’ll Kill the Internet By Christopher Cox and Ron Wyden .....According to the bill’s text, if Congress can’t agree on a successor to Section 230 by Dec. 31, 2025, websites from Yahoo and Etsy to the local restaurant hosting customer reviews will become liable for every syllable posted on the site by a user or troll. A single post can generate claims that run into the millions of dollars. Reverting to this pre-Section 230 status quo would dramatically alter, and imperil, the online world. Most platforms don’t charge users for access to their sites. In the brave new world of unlimited liability, will a website decide that carrying user-created content free of charge isn’t worth the risk? If so, the era of consumer freedom to both publish and view web content will come to a screeching halt. People United for Privacy: House Ways and Means Committee Advances ‘More IRS Interference’ Acts By Alex Baiocco .....“Federal agencies should not be in the business of writing regulations demanding that tax-exempt organizations abide by disclosure requirements that Congress has not enacted into law,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) declared in his opening statement during a recent full committee markup session. While Smith and his fellow Republicans’ efforts to prevent such regulations is laudable, the primary intent of the legislation advanced at the Committee’s May 15 markup is to enact more stringent disclosure requirements for tax-exempt organizations. Indeed, as People United for Privacy’s (PUFP) letter to the Committee explains, the nonprofit disclosure requirements in H.R. 8293 are designed to bypass the privacy protections found in the same bill. In addition to this bill, dubbed the “American Donor Privacy and Foreign Funding Transparency Act,” PUFP also expressed concerns to the Committee about the “No Foreign Election Interference Act” (H.R. 8314) and “Foreign Grant Reporting Act” (H.R. 8290). Reporters Committee: Congress’s crackdown on ‘terrorist supporting organizations’ threatens nonprofit news By Grayson Clary .....The legislation, which sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives in April, would allow the secretary to suspend the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit that he or she designates as “having provided … material support or resources” to a foreign terrorist organization. As you probably intuited, intentionally providing material support to terrorists is already a crime — but Treasury’s new authority would have a broader sweep because it lacks an intent requirement. And while the bill would require the secretary to first provide notice of the looming penalty to any nonprofit affected, the secretary would have no obligation to explain what support the organization allegedly gave if “national security and law enforcement interests” favor secrecy. Free Expression New York Post: Cornell University using DEI policy to reject faculty candidates for not ‘conforming,’ group claims By Carl Campanile .....Cornell University is “corrupting” its science, math and engineering programs by using its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policy to reject a huge portion of candidates for faculty jobs because their views are deemed counter to the school’s left-leaning “ideological orthodoxy,” a merit-based campus advocacy group alleged after reviewing bombshell leaked documents. A report by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance cities “smoking gun” evidence that the “DEI Statements” of prospective professors were used to reject 21% of applicants in a recent faculty search in a hard science field. The Upstate New York Ivy no longer requires candidates to submit explanations of how they would advance Cornell’s commitment to the principle of DEI — but such forms were used against the job hopefuls anyway, the Free Speech Alliance said. ADF: JPMorgan Chase's strides to protect Americans from financial discrimination highlight third year of ADF Business Index .....On Tuesday, Alliance Defending Freedom announced the results of its third annual Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index. The first comprehensive benchmark designed to measure corporate respect for free speech and religious freedom across 43 performance indicators, the Business Index scored 85 publicly traded corporations in its year-three edition. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): An Interview with Judge Matthew Solomson About the Columbia Boycott By Josh Blackman .....In the wake of the announced boycott against Columbia University, I posed several questions to Judge Matthew Solomson of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. I provide his answers, with light editing, below: Online Speech Platforms Cato: A Guide to Content Moderation for Policymakers By David Inserra .....Content moderation represents the policies and practices that companies use to express their own preferences and to create the kind of online space that is best for their interests. Government policies that interfere with these content decisions not only harm the rights of private actors but also are likely to cause harmful unintended consequences and chill innovation. While prominent social media platforms may be biased and imperfect, the government cannot solve these problems and will only make them worse. Racket News: Note to Readers: That Eerie Silence By Matt Taibbi .....Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation. If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon. The States Courthouse News: Abortion foe seeks First Amendment immunity for ‘abortion reversal’ offers By Natalie Hanson .....An anti-abortion nonprofit told a California judge Tuesday the Golden State's protection of the rights to reproductive health care gives it the First Amendment right to offer help to Californians who want to “reverse abortions.” Alameda County Superior Court Judge Michael Markman will rule on a motion to quash in a case questioning whether anti-abortion nonprofits can invoke the First Amendment and California’s constitutional protection of pregnant people to offer what they call “abortion reversal.” He also must rule on warring motions for demurrer from the state Attorney General’s office and defendants Heartbeat International and RealOptions... [Heartbeat attorney Paul] Jonna said that the court must “take a critical look at the rights of women to bear children, and nonprofits to help them free of charge.” He said Heartbeat helps women who felt pressured to get abortions and that California is denying people the choice to give birth, while suppressing what he called “unpopular ideas or information.” Axios: Scoop: Google threatens to pause Google News Initiative funding in U.S. By Sara Fischer .....Google is warning nonprofit newsrooms that passage of a new California bill would jeopardize the firm's future investments in the U.S. news industry, sources told Axios. This is the second time this year Google has threatened to pull investment in news in response to a regulatory threat in California — but this time, hundreds of publishers outside of California would also feel the impact. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. 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