Email from The Institute for Free Speech The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech September 9, 2025 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]. New from the Institute for Free Speech Institute for Free Speech Urges SCOTUS to Strike Down Coordinated Party Expenditure Limits .....Election campaigns are political speech. By conflating election campaign speech with the mechanics of running elections, the Supreme Court has allowed the government to trample the First Amendment through campaign finance laws. That’s why the Institute for Free Speech filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (NRSC v. FEC). The Courts New Jersey Monitor: Appeals court revives retaliation claim by ex-professor who praised Hitler By Dana DiFilippo .....A federal appeals panel has determined that a New Jersey university was wrong to deny a philosophy professor continued employment after learning he praised Adolf Hitler and made other controversial comments outside the classroom. Judge Paul Matey of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Jason Reza Jorjani’s off-campus comments were protected by the First Amendment and did not disrupt the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s educational mission, as it claimed. Matey, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, cited a 2021 federal ruling that sided with an Ohio professor disciplined for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. Courthouse News: North Carolina state senator sues over AI-manipulated ad By Sydney Haulenbeek .....North Carolina state Senator DeAndrea Salvador has filed suit against Whirlpool and Omnicom Group over an AI-manipulated ad featuring her. The suit, which was filed Wednesday evening, takes aim at Omnicom Group, Whirlpool Corporation and DDB Worldwide Communications Group LLC over an ad promoting energy-efficient appliances in Brazil. The three-term state senator recorded a TED Talk in 2018, discussing making energy more affordable for low-income families in the U.S. But DM9, a subsidiary of the DDB network, used copyrighted footage from Salvador’s talk to create the “Efficient Way to Pay” campaign to urge Brazilian consumers to upgrade to Whirlpool’s Consul appliances. The ad artificially manipulated CNN’s Brazil broadcasts and Salvador’s TED Talk, she said in the suit, and “notwithstanding the completely false and manipulated content,” the defendants submitted the ad to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where it won the 2025 Grand Grand Prix in the Creative Data category. Lawfare: Anthropic’s Settlement Shows the U.S. Can’t Afford AI Copyright Lawsuits By Stewart Baker .....Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion to settle a copyright case that it largely won in district court. Future litigants are likely to hold out for much more. A uniquely punitive provision of copyright law will allow plaintiffs who may not have suffered any damage to seek awards in the trillions. (Indeed, observers estimated that Anthropic dodged $1 trillion in liability by settling.) The avalanche of litigation, already forty lawsuits and counting, doesn’t just put the artificial intelligence (AI) industry at risk of spending their investors’ money on settlements instead of advances in AI. It raises the prospect that the full bill won’t be known for a decade, as different juries and different courts reach varying conclusions. A decade of massive awards and deep uncertainty poses a major threat to the U.S. industry. The Trump administration saw the risk even before the Anthropic settlement, but its AI action plan offered no solution. That’s a mistake; the litigation could easily keep the U.S. from winning its race with China to truly transformational AI. FEC Florida Trident: Byron Donalds skirts campaign finance laws in dual bids for Congress, Governor By Melanie Payne .....Last month the FEC, which enforces and administers campaign finance laws, sent a letter to Bradley T. Crate, treasurer for both of Donalds’ campaigns. The letter, signed by a senior analyst at the FEC, stated that contributions made to the Congressional campaign after the date of Donalds’ governor’s race announcement “must be refunded, except to the extent there were net debts outstanding for the campaign on the date each primary election contribution was received.” But Donalds isn’t returning the donors’ money. According to Crate’s response to the FEC, even though Donalds has announced he’s running for Florida governor, “Congressman Donalds is still an active candidate for the 2025-2026 Election Cycle” and “he has not officially ended his Congressional re-election campaign and he has made no announcement to that effect.” About $400,000, at last report, came in after he became a candidate for governor… Keeping both campaign accounts allows a candidate to shift the money around, said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University Law. He cited U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat from New Jersey, who, like Donalds, took money from her federal campaign contributions and gave it to a PAC that supported her campaign for governor… No matter what Donalds does with the federal campaign money, any enforcement action from the FEC is unlikely, Vandewalker added… “The Republican appointees [to the Commission] in some ways don’t seem to believe in the mission of the FEC and choose not to enforce or interpret the rules,” he said. “ That makes enforcement have less teeth.” But the way Jeff Swartz sees it, Donalds isn’t doing anything wrong and the FEC should back off. Swartz, professor emeritus at Cooley Law School in Tampa said Florida law prohibits someone from being a candidate for two offices whose terms overlap. Donalds has filed paperwork declaring he’s a candidate for Governor, but hasn’t declared that he’s a candidate for Congress in the next term. “He may be violating the spirit of the law,” Swartz said, but not the letter of the law. Trump Administration Reuters: US bank regulator issues guidelines to avert 'debanking' .....A top U.S. banking regulator said Monday it was rolling out new guidance to discourage banks from cutting off, or "debanking," customers on political and religious grounds, a month after President Donald Trump directed oversight agencies to scrutinize banks for political bias. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said in a statement it had issued two bulletins explaining how it would scrutinize bank policies for avoiding such discrimination and how banks should limit sharing of customer data in reporting suspicious activity to government authorities. Jonesing For Nonprofits: State Department Sanctions Three International NGOs for ICC Petitions By Darryll K. Jones .....The United States continues to aggressively use its anti-terror legal apparatus against nongovernmental organizations that advocate against its views. This is a phenomenon that manifests domestically and internationally. Ultimately, the strategy will only increase the wars and violence the United States assertedly seeks to end. Online Speech Platforms USA Today: Meta and Mark Zuckerberg just became the free speech champions we needed By Jonathan Turley .....For many, the Meta culpa seemed strained and opportunistic. However, I had the opportunity to have in-depth discussions with Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan about these plans. I was impressed and I wrote that, despite the bad blood with the company, the free speech community should give Meta a chance to prove that it was serious about restoring free speech protections. As I stated in my column, we need Meta. Musk changed the trajectory of the fight for free speech, but the difference between the two companies is impossible to ignore. X reports that it has roughly 600 million users. Facebook remains the largest social media company, with more than 3 billion users. For free speech defenders, it is the difference between England's entry into World War II and the United States' entry. Musk slowed the progress of the anti-free speech movement. Zuckerberg could reverse the direction. Recently, Kaplan and I reviewed the progress at Meta. He was remarkably transparent and candid about their efforts, and what I learned was heartening. The chief global affairs officer stated that "we are allowing more speech," but the company has not seen an explosion of hate speech as a result of greater tolerance for opposing views. He admitted that "content was being taken down that should not have been taken down. We reduced over-enforcement." Independent Groups Channel 3000: Former employees question Minocqua Brewing Super PAC's use of donations By Jason Cuevas .....Former employees at Minocqua Brewing Company's Madison tap room question how the brewery's political Super PAC, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC, uses donations, saying employees were paid from the PAC despite doing no work for it… Dan Weiner, director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on Super PACs, said while political candidates face strict rules about personal spending with campaign funds, Super PACs operate under different guidelines. "That restriction at the federal level does not apply to super PACs," he said. "That's a loophole that we've never fixed. And so you do actually see at least some super PACs that essentially turn into scam PACs where they're basically raising all this money from donors who think that they're contributing for purposes of, you know, political advocacy. But then this, a lot of it gets funneled back into whoever is organizing the super PAC." The States Charlotte Observer: A new fundraising complaint will test the GOP-led State Board of Elections By Ned Barnett .....Two GOP state leaders are at the center of a complaint filed with the State Board of Elections that alleges violations of campaign finance laws, including donations made in the name of people who deny they made a contribution. The use of “straw donors” who give more than $10,000 can be a felony. Now we’ll see whether the board, whose control was shifted by a new state law from the governor to Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek, will aggressively investigate the complaint that could affect the campaign funds of two Republican leaders – House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger… [The complaint] focuses on a May 31 fundraiser hosted by the N.C. Association of Indian Americans (NCAIA) to benefit Speaker Hall and Berger. The event generated a huge amount of campaign donations – $338,000. The money was divided nearly equally between the two state lawmakers. It was an extraordinary outpouring from the Indian American community. The complaint notes that the donors’ contributions “exceeds their total contributions of $260,000 over the past 25 years to all other state legislative, judicial and executive branch candidates.” The complaint also notes that “nearly two-thirds of the Indian American donors had not given a recorded contribution to a state-level campaign before this event.” Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Woman Repeatedly Badmouthed Ex-Lover, Ordered Not to Say Anything Online About Him, Lost Gun Rights By Eugene Volokh .....Stafford v. Molano, decided Friday by California Court of Appeal Judge Brian Hoffstadt, joined by Judges Carl Moor and Dorothy Kim, upheld a restraining order (which included the provision that "Respondent shall not post about Petitioner online") that was apparently largely based on two sorts of speech: allegations of sexual assault, which defendant had apparently admitted were false, and allegations of nonconsensual taking of an intimate photograph, which I think defendant never recanted. I don't think the decision is correct (see here for my general views on the matter)—especially since the injunction forbids even nondefamatory speech, and was expressly not based on a finding that all the speech was false. But this is indeed the way recent California court decisions have been going. 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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