This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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Donor Privacy
By Tim Hoefer
.....The state attorney general’s office for years has collected financial documents from nonprofit organizations. Under former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the agency took a dangerous step and began demanding these groups — including churches, synagogues and others — turn over lists with the names and home addresses of their donors. Attorney General Letitia James continued the practice when she took office in 2019.
The state never had any defensible reason for collecting these, which is why many groups (including the Empire Center) refused to share them.
But the groups that complied found a worse fate awaited them. At least one of them, the nonprofit Stand for America, had their good behavior rewarded by having their donor list leaked illegally to a journalist.
This breach of constitutional privacy should concern every single New Yorker — especially because it stems from the office of the state’s top legal official.
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By Cole Lauterbach
.....Scot Mussi, president of the nonprofit Arizona Free Enterprise Club, says [Proposition 211] is likely an unconstitutional infringement of free speech.
“One of the bedrock principles our country was founded upon was the right to free speech, which includes being able to support causes and issues they believe in without fear of harassment and intimidation,” he said. “Just last year the [U.S. Supreme Court] affirmed this right, declaring that any effort to require non-profit organizations to publish the names of their donors and supporters is unconstitutional.”
Mussi notes that the effort would subject donors to the recent harassment campaigns that have become common under “cancel culture.” The phenomenon is characterized by a semi-private individual or public-serving business facing backlash in the form of boycotts, threats, or campaigns to harm a person with the intent to scare others off from doing what that person or business did.
“They want the names of private citizens so that they can doxx, harass and cancel them in their communities,” Mussi said.
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FEC
By Russ Choma
.....But on the eve of what will soon become the most expensive mid-term election, transparency activists are livid over the actions of the commission’s newest Democratic member who joined the FEC in August. Biden appointee Dara Lindenbaum, a campaign finance attorney, has strong liberal credentials but has several times voted with the Republicans to dismiss enforcement cases that advocates had hoped would be pushed to the courts to decide.
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By Ed Pilkington
.....“We live in an increasingly online society, and political campaigns are moving online, but federal transparency rules have never been updated to take that into account,” said Daniel Weiner, head of the elections and government program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center.
Adav Noti, legal director of the non-profit Campaign Legal Center, spent 10 years as a lawyer at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) which is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws. He expressed dismay at the agency’s inability to keep up with a dramatically changing media landscape.
“We are more than a decade into an era of campaigns increasingly being conducted through digital, and the only government agency charged with regulating that activity has done nothing about it. Literally not a single piece of regulation.”
Noti said that one of the effects of the FEC failing to engage with the explosion in online political advertising has been that social media giants and other big digital platforms have been left to their own devices. “Facebook, Google, TikTok and the rest have become the de facto regulators, and they set their own rules.”
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Biden Administration
.....Elon Musk has not actually changed the “content moderation” policies at Twitter yet, but President Joe Biden went on a virtual rave on Friday over the prospect of free speech breaking out on a single social media site. As a type of censor-in-chief, Biden has led calls for censorship on social media, which have been largely heeded by companies like Facebook and Twitter. Now Biden is accusing Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world” by seeking to reduce one of the largest censorship systems in history. The President lamented that the influence of the media will be “de minimus.” He is a bit late on that front.
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The Courts
By Caitlin Oprysko
.....Jurors [Friday] cleared real estate investor and longtime Trump friend Tom Barrack of illegally acting as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates, dealing the Justice Department another stinging setback in its efforts to crack down on illicit foreign influence campaigns that some foreign-lobbying experts predicted could impact how the department employs a relatively novel approach to prosecuting such efforts.
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The States
By Brianna Herlihy
.....California Attorney General Rob Bonta is urging Big Tech platforms to censor election-related content ahead of the Tuesday midterms, saying uncontrolled speech on social media was fueling violent incidents like the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband.
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By Ken Stone
.....The San Diego City Council is violating the First Amendment rights of citizens with a policy barring certain public comments at council meetings, a lawsuit filed Friday alleges.
Civil rights attorney Bryan Pease, a former City Council candidate, is asking the San Diego Superior Court on behalf of the Animal Protection and Rescue League, which he chairs, to halt the council policy.
He says the suit is a response to the council “prohibiting public comment at council and committee meetings that the meeting chair believes are ‘for the promotion of any political candidacy or for the promotion of any ballot measure.’”
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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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