The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech August 8, 2022 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 Luke Wachob at [email protected]. In the News The Hill: Big Tech’s court wins risk a big backlash against Section 230 By Bradley A. Smith .....2022 has been a good year for Big Tech in court. On May 23, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that Florida’s social media law, which limits the ability of major platforms to ban political posts based on viewpoint, was, in all key respects, unconstitutional. Eight days later, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a similar Texas law from going into effect while litigation plays out in the 5th Circuit, an early indication that the law will have an uphill climb when it eventually reaches — as it almost certainly will — the Supreme Court for consideration on the merits. Within these victories, however, lie the seeds of disaster for the platforms — the possible repeal, or substantial alteration, of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Bleeding Heartland: Iowa campaign regulator may require attribution for political texts By Laura Belin .....The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board may soon clarify whether state laws on attribution statements apply to some kinds of political text messages, the board's executive director Zach Goodrich told Bleeding Heartland. Goodrich plans to draft an advisory opinion that would confirm when text messages are "electronic general public political advertising" subject to Iowa's law requiring disclosure of who is responsible for express campaign advocacy… Bleeding Heartland also asked Goodrich whether anything in Iowa law forbids misleading texts like the last-minute blitz in Kansas, which lied to voters about what a "yes" vote would mean. Goodrich replied, "If there is a prohibition on sending misleading/false text messages such as what was sent to Kansans, it is not found in Iowa Code chapter 68A or 68B," the statutes the ethics board is charged with enforcing... False political speech is protected under the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has found. The Federal Trade Commission's regulations regarding fraudulent commercial advertising "don’t apply to political ads," Alex Baiocco explained in a 2020 blog post for the Institute for Free Speech. Supreme Court Politico: The NRA’s Shadowy Supreme Court Lobbying Campaign By Will Van Sant .....The court’s guidelines surrounding financial disclosure for amicus filers are ambiguous and can be read so narrowly that experts say it’s easy for organizations to skirt them. Without a stronger rule, warn advocates pushing to bolster court ethics guidelines, groups like the NRA are essentially able to lobby the Supreme Court while keeping their role hidden. “Reasonable people would question whether justices should be accepting these briefs,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group supporting more robust ethics rules and greater accountability for the federal court system, “The court needs to adopt a more exacting rubric centered on transparency.” Over the past two decades, as more money and political energy have been directed at major Supreme Court cases, the marshaling of favorable amicus briefs — in which law professors and other specialists offer advice to the court, nudging it one way or the other — has become an industry of its own, a form of shadow lobbying targeting an institution that, in theory, is not supposed to be lobbied. The number of briefs filed surged, and justices have cited them with ever greater regularity. Congress Washington Post: Democrats call on IRS to review right-wing group’s ‘church’ status By Jack Jenkins .....Congressional House Democrats are asking the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of a prominent conservative advocacy group recently reclassified as a church, arguing the organization may be exploiting the designation to avoid scrutiny. Forty Democratic lawmakers, led by U.S. Reps. Suzan DelBene (Wash.) and Jared Huffman (Calif.), outlined their concerns about the Family Research Council in a letter sent to the head of the IRS and the secretary of the Treasury on Monday. According to a recent report from ProPublica, the FRC successfully applied to be reclassified as a “group of churches” in 2020. Lawmakers say that while the FRC often appeals to faith and advocates for a “biblical worldview,” the status change “strains credulity” because the group operates primarily as “a political advocacy organization.” The Courts Associated Press: Alex Jones’ $49.3M verdict and the future of misinformation By Michael R. Sisak .....But what does this week’s verdict, the first of three Sandy Hook-related cases against Jones to be decided, mean for the larger misinformation ecosystem, a social media-fueled world of election denial, COVID-19 skepticism and other dubious claims that the Infowars conspiracy theorist helped build? “I think a lot of people are thinking of this as sort of a blow against fake news, and it’s important to realize that libel law deals with a very particular kind of fake news,” said Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment professor at the UCLA School of Law. Candidates and Campaigns Roll Call: Voters aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of inflation By Kate Ackley .....High inflation isn’t just a political messaging point to some candidates running for office. The cost of gasoline, travel, staff pay, printed materials and food for events all affect the bottom lines of campaigns... “The next adjustment of the contribution limits will be in the winter months of 2023, when the limits will be set for the 2024 cycle,” said Michael Toner, a former Federal Election Commissioner who chairs the election law and ethics practice at law firm Wiley. “And because of inflation and the way it’s running so high, we might see a jump of $200 or $300. We’re certainly going to reach at least $3,000 per election for individual donations.” ... “The cost of campaigning was escalating even when inflation wasn’t high,” Toner noted. Free Expression Wall Street Journal: Make Freedom of Speech Liberal Again By Tunku Varadarajan .....[Nadine Strossen] has made a career as a legal and scholarly defender of classical liberal ideals, most notably as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 through 2008. She brings up John Stuart Mill (1806-73), the British philosopher and parliamentarian, by way of citing his view, as she puts it, “that everything should be subject to re-examination,” including “our most cherished ideas.” For her, that means “I continue to re-examine my longstanding belief about the mutually reinforcing relationship between free speech and equality, and I continue to be completely convinced that these are two mutually reinforcing values.” That view has increasingly made her an outlier on the left. Online Speech Platforms Protocol: Dark money is trying to take down the Inflation Reduction Act from the left By Lisa Martine Jenkins .....While the campaign itself is not particularly sophisticated...it is an illustration of how social media is still being leveraged to sow doubt and confusion despite platforms trying to clean up the information environment... United for Clean Power is a symptom of how quickly and easily social media allows interest groups — both nefarious and not — to reach a targeted audience. “Social media has allowed people to target super-specific audiences with messages about energy,” Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, told Protocol. “The scariest thing about social media is that you can test if a message is working.” Associated Press: Meta quieter on election misinformation as midterms loom By Amanda Seitz .....Facebook owner Meta is quietly curtailing some of the safeguards designed to thwart voting misinformation or foreign interference in U.S. elections as the November midterm vote approaches. It’s a sharp departure from the social media giant’s multibillion-dollar efforts to enhance the accuracy of posts about U.S. elections and regain trust from lawmakers and the public after their outrage over learning the company had exploited people’s data and allowed falsehoods to overrun its site during the 2016 campaign. The pivot is raising alarm about Meta’s priorities and about how some might exploit the world’s most popular social media platforms to spread misleading claims, launch fake accounts and rile up partisan extremists. “They’re not talking about it,” said former Facebook policy director Katie Harbath, now the CEO of the tech and policy firm Anchor Change. “Best case scenario: They’re still doing a lot behind the scenes. Worst case scenario: They pull back, and we don’t know how that’s going to manifest itself for the midterms on the platforms.” Since last year, Meta has shut down an examination into how falsehoods are amplified in political ads on Facebook by indefinitely banishing the researchers from the site. The States CalMatters: Force multipliers: How one donor network is pushing the envelope on California campaign money By Ben Christopher, Alexei Koseff, and Jeremia Kimelman .....Govern For California characterizes its 18 chapters as “force multipliers” that amplify the influence of its donors on state politics and government. The 11-year-old organization — the brainchild of 68-year-old Stanford lecturer David Crane, and funded primarily by a group of Bay Area venture capitalists, tech executives and philanthropists — opposes what it regards as excessive sway of labor unions over state policy. None of the campaign finance experts CalMatters spoke with said they thought Govern For California was doing anything illegal. But Ann Ravel, former head of the Federal Election Commission and California’s campaign finance agency, said its chapter donation operation was “undemocratic,” albeit similar to the model organized labor unions use. Some experts also questioned whether it’s a way for its small cadre of wealthy donors to evade contribution caps designed to limit anyone from having outsized influence on state politics. “Aside from getting around contribution limits, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to go through this extra effort,” said Stan Oklobdzija, a visiting public policy professor at UC Riverside who researches campaign finance. He said he hadn’t seen anything comparable to the Govern For California strategy in the state. U.S. News & World Report: Eyman Forced to Sell House to Pay Campaign Finance Fines By Associated Press .....Watch salesman turned anti-tax initiative promoter Tim Eyman, who was found liable last year for “numerous and particularly egregious” violations of campaign finance law, has been forced to sell his house to help pay millions of dollars of fines and debt. A federal bankruptcy judge Thursday approved a resolution requiring Eyman to sell his portion of a Mukilteo house to his ex-wife, The Seattle Times reported. The $900,000 in proceeds will go toward paying over $5.6 million in sanctions and legal fees he owes the state of Washington and other creditors... Eyman was ordered to pay more than $2.9 million in legal fees to cover the cost of Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s yearslong investigation and prosecution. Eyman described the penalties against him as “ridiculously unconstitutional and absurdly excessive” in an email to the newspaper. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Federal Prosecutor Sets Up Hotline for Reporting, Among Other Things, People "Espousing … Hate-Filled Views" By Eugene Volokh .....A press release Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney in charge of the federal prosecutor's office in Massachusetts, Rachael S. Rollins announced the rollout of an "End Hate Now" telephone hotline (emphasis added): 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 First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org. 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