The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech August 21, 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]. The Courts New York Times: How a Law That Shields Big Tech Is Now Being Used Against It By David McCabe .....Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms rely on a 1996 law to insulate themselves from legal liability for user posts. The protection from this law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is so significant that it has allowed tech companies to flourish. But what if the same law could be used to rein in the power of those social media giants? That idea is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in May against Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The plaintiff has asked a federal court to declare that a little-used part of Section 230 makes it permissible for him to release his own software that lets users automatically unfollow everyone on Facebook. Lifenews.com: Massachusetts Pregnancy Centers Sue Governor to Stop Campaign to Shut Them Down By Nathan Moelker and Olivia Summers .....We’ve shared with you our massive campaign on behalf of pro-life pregnancy centers, also known as Pregnancy Resource Centers (PRCs). We have now also taken legal action and filed a complaint on behalf of one of those PRCs, Your Options Medical (YOM), against Massachusetts officials and their allies. With Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center serving as our local counsel, we have filed a major constitutional lawsuit in federal district court in Massachusetts. Our lawsuit alleges that the state officials engaged in an overt viewpoint-based discrimination campaign – including harassment, suppression, and threats against YOM and other PRCs. Directed by Governor Maura Healey, this pro-abortion smear campaign involves selective law enforcement prosecution, public threats, and even a state-sponsored advertising campaign with a singular goal – to deprive YOM and their counterparts of their First Amendment rights to voice freely their religious and political viewpoints regarding the sanctity of human life. Free Expression Johns Hopkins University (Office of the President): On institutional statements from the university .....Although institutional statements may feel warranted, consoling, or, at times, even necessary to guide the university through difficult moments, experience has shown that they can be counterproductive, and even at odds with our core mission. These statements can too easily fuel a perception that there are approved or endorsed “institutional” views on political or social issues, which may, in fact, conflict with the views of members of our community. They risk interfering with our truth-seeking function and compromising the ethos and credibility of the institution in the process. Additionally, institutional statements can be perceived as performative or rote: They can excuse the absence of meaningful action to bring the community together in challenging moments, take up difficult questions, and learn, discuss, and debate together in a mutually respectful and supportive manner. They also can unintentionally model for our students that the only, or best, avenue for engaging with issues is to make public statements, obscuring that there are more effective ways to make change in the world. Candidates and Campaigns Washington Post (Tech Brief): How Democrats’ party platform has shifted on tech policy By Cristiano Lima-Strong .....The document laying out Democratic priorities for 2024, released Sunday, includes a number of firsts, according to a Tech Brief review of past party platforms: There’s a whole section dedicated to “seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI,” a sign of the technology’s growing prevalence in political debates. It calls for investing in research, banning voice impersonations, ensuring economic gains are shared with workers and harnessing AI for government functions… There’s a novel section dedicated to “protecting kids online” among other long-standing Democratic tech causes, like “strengthening Americans’ data privacy… This year’s platform explicitly mentions Section 230, the embattled legal shield that protects a broad range of digital services from lawsuits over the user content. It calls for “fundamentally” reforming the law “to ensure that platforms take responsibility for the content they share.” Social media disinformation was briefly mentioned in 2020. New York Times: Harris and Trump Shield Their Big Campaign Fund-Raisers From the Public By Theodore Schleifer .....About a month before voting begins in some states, American voters have less knowledge about the people helping the 2024 presidential candidates raise money than they have had in any election in 20 years. That’s because, for the first time in modern presidential fund-raising, neither the Democratic nor the Republican nominee has disclosed the names of so-called bundlers, the people who amass large financial contributions for presidential campaigns and, in the eyes of transparency advocates, wield significant power in campaigns and presidential administrations. The disclosure of bundlers is not required by law. Washington Post: Trump’s AI fakes of Harris and Swift aren’t meant to fool you By Will Oremus .....The images of Swifties for Trump and Harris as a communist leader don’t appear intended primarily to fool people, though of course some might be taken in. Some of the Swifties images, part of an X post of which Trump shared a screenshot, carried a “satire” label. The Harris image was unlabeled but patently unrealistic. Rather, the images seem to function more like memes, meant to provoke and amuse. They’re visual parallels to the nasty nicknames Trump calls his opponents and the evidence-free claims he often makes on the campaign trail. For a politician whose favored rhetorical mode is the unconfirmed anecdote — “Many people are saying ...” — generative AI offers a handy new way to illustrate his stories. New York Times: A Desperate Kennedy Campaign, and the Mystery of 110,000 Signatures By Rebecca Davis O’Brien .....On Friday, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president, delivered boxes carrying 110,000 signatures to election officials in Arizona, to secure ballot access in a critical battleground state. A vast majority of those signatures, according to two people closely involved with the campaign’s operations, were not gathered by local volunteers, or even by paid canvassers working for the campaign. Instead, the people said, they came from a super PAC backing Mr. Kennedy that gathered signatures in Arizona months ago but set them aside after their efforts prompted legal challenges. The issue of who collected the signatures is critical because coordination between super PACs and campaign committees is banned under federal law, though that rule — meant to limit the influence of megadonors on campaigns — has steadily eroded in recent years, as regulators have allowed exceptions and political groups have found workarounds. Among other prohibitions, super PACs are not allowed to give “in-kind” contributions to a campaign — basically, providing services free of charge. The States Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Court Reverses Injunction Against Anti-Anti-Semitic Speech Targeted at Neighbor By Eugene Volokh .....From today's Pennsylvania Supreme Court majority opinion in Oberholzer v. Galapo, written by Justice Kevin Dougherty, joined by Chief Justice Debra Todd and Justices Christine Donohue and Sallie Updyke Mundy: 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. 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