This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact Luke Wachob at [email protected].
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In the News
.....Scott Blackburn, Research Director at the Institute for Free Speech, discusses a first-of-its-kind report that grades the freedom of citizens and advocacy groups in each state to speak about candidates, government and issues of public policy, which states performed poorly, and which states earned a respectable score.
Ed. note: Read the report here.
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Biden Administration
By Rebecca Shabad
.....In a statement, DHS said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas decided to terminate the Disinformation Governance Board following a recommendation from the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which provides the DHS secretary with independent advice.
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Congress
By Rebecca Kern
.....The Senate Judiciary Committee announced a hearing on Sept. 13 featuring the testimony of Peiter Zatko, whose whistleblower complaint made public on Tuesday alleges “egregious” privacy and security violations at the company...
“Mr. Zatko’s allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter raise serious concerns. If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and and ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a joint statement.
Twitter has called the allegations “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies.”
The Judiciary Committee’s hearing could be the first of many. House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), for example, said he has concerns about how the security allegations could impact the November midterms.
“Our adversaries have a history of exploiting social media to disrupt our elections — and with the midterms only three months away, there is no time to waste,” he said Tuesday.
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The Media
By Corbin Bolies
.....New Hampshire’s attorney general announced on Thursday that the state had arrested the publisher of a local weekly newspaper in Londonderry earlier this week, alleging she illegally published political ads without properly disclosing them to be ads.
Londonderry Times publisher Debra Paul, 62, was arrested Wednesday, according to State Attorney General John M. Formella, and was charged with six violations of the state’s misdemeanor laws on political advertisements. Paul, along with her husband, runs Nutfield Publishing, which publishes the Times and the Nutfield News/Tri-Town Times.
In an affidavit, investigator Daniel Mederos wrote that in two different Londonderry Times issues spanning February and March 2022, Paul printed ads for various school board candidates or budget proposals that did not include a “Paid For” label at either the beginning or end of the ads, as required by state law. The ads also did not include the names or addresses of the people who financed the advertisements—also required by state law.
Formella’s office said Paul had been warned multiple times about the issue since 2019, with a “final warning” letter being issued last September over the ads’ proper labeling. Paul pleaded with the attorney general’s office by email in May, arguing political advertisements were “not my area of expertise.”
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By Jeremy W. Peters
.....Some of the biggest names at Fox News have been questioned, or are scheduled to be questioned in the coming days, by lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network, as the election technology company presses ahead with a case that First Amendment scholars say is extraordinary in its scope and significance.
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Free Expression
By Eugene Kontorovich
.....One of the dirty secrets of American constitutional law is the tension between antidiscrimination laws and free expression. It blew into public view last week, when federal district judge Mark Walker struck down a Florida law dealing with hostile work environments on the grounds that it impermissibly infringed on the First Amendment. According to Judge Walker, an employer’s liberty is violated by not being able to make racially deprecatory, essentialist and stereotyping comments. The First Amendment demands a “marketplace of ideas,” he ruled in Honeyfund v. DeSantis. So employees who object when the boss peddles disparaging comments about their race should argue rather than sue.
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Online Speech Platforms
By Jared Gans
.....Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week told popular podcaster Joe Rogan that Facebook did limit stories on the news feed related to the New York Post story about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his laptop after warnings from the FBI, but defended the law enforcement agency as a “legitimate institution.”
Zuckerberg said on an episode of Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” that was uploaded on Thursday that the FBI reached out to his company ahead of the 2020 presidential election to warn them to take note of potentially polarizing content. This warning came after Russia used social media platforms, including Facebook, to post content intended to be polarizing ahead of the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg said he took the warning seriously. He said the social media platform did not ban people from sharing the Post’s story, but it took action to limit how often the story appeared on feeds.
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.....“Tricky.” Over the course of 110 pages in a federal complaint, that one descriptive word seemed to stand out among the exchanges between social media executives and public health officials on censoring public viewpoints. The exchange reveals long-suspected coordination between the government and these social media companies to manage a burgeoning censorship system.
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By Naomi Nix
.....Facebook gave politicians 13 exemptions to its content-moderation rules over a one-year period because their offending posts were determined to be newsworthy, the company revealed Thursday in a series of quarterly reports on its moderation practices.
The company also said it had applied the newsworthiness exception to 55 other cases between June 2021 and June 2022...
Since 2016, Facebook has evaluated whether the newsworthiness of political speech outweighs its propensity to cause harm. Facebook said in June 2021 that it would no longer automatically give politicians a pass for newsworthiness when they break the company’s rules.
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By Taylor Lorenz
.....Over the past week, Twitter has flagged dozens of tweets with factual information about covid-19 as misinformation and in some cases has suspended the accounts of doctors, scientists, and patient advocates in response to their posts warning people about the illness’s dangers.
Many of the tweets have since had the misinformation labels removed, and the suspended accounts have been restored. But the episode has shaken many scientific and medical professionals, who say Twitter is a key way they try to publicize the continuing risk of covid to a population that has grown weary of more than two years of shifting claims about the illness.
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The States
.....The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected challenges to two voter initiatives, one already certified for November's ballot and the another that appears likely to make it when a final signature verification is complete.
The Supreme Court said in unanimous opinions that they will not block a measure that will require greater transparency for political spending and another that will boost the amount of assets shielded from creditors...
Opponents, mainly business groups, argued that paid petition circulators for all three measures failed to comply with the law because they did not file affidavits certifying they met legal requirements each time they told the secretary of state they would gather needed signatures for a particular initiative...
Former Attorney General Terry Goddard, who has worked for years to get the “Voters Right to Know” measure on the ballot, applauded the ruling.
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By Matt Friedman
.....On Wednesday, Assembly Republicans made a parody video ad that featured the NJEA’s logo, riffing on the union calling some of the parents who have showed up to local school board meetings to protest the new sex ed standards “extremists.”
By Thursday morning, the video had been taken off YouTube “due to a copyright claim by the New Jersey Education Association.”
Let’s be clear: Some of the people protesting these sex ed standards are extremists (see Nicholas Ferrara). And some have put out a lot of scare-mongering misinformation that’s heavily centered on the trope of gay people “grooming” children. But getting a video pulled from a website doesn’t help the NJEA’s cause when they’re being accused of trying to silence people.
“The NJEA’s action only drives home the Republicans’ point that they will stop at nothing to censor differing opinions, whether it is parents at board meetings or political speech in a video,” Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio (R-Warren) said in a statement.
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By Alexei Koseff and Ben Christopher
.....California’s campaign finance regulator will not investigate a complaint into Govern For California, the subject of a CalMatters investigation that explored the nonprofit’s role influencing legislative elections and “pushing the envelope” of state campaign finance law.
But the chairperson of the Fair Political Practices Commission said he would seek to develop new regulations more clearly defining coordination among affiliated campaign committees, because he has questions about the independence of Govern For California’s network of chapters and whether they could potentially be circumventing contribution limits.
“I’m troubled by the allegations that were presented in the complaint and I’m troubled by the fact that this organization seems to be, I think, playing very close to the line,” said Richard Miadich, who said he plans to bring up the issue at the September FPPC meeting. “It’s one thing to say you’re independent. It’s another to in fact be independent.”
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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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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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