The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech December 5, 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 [email protected]. Supreme Court SCOTUSblog: Colorado web designer’s First Amendment challenge will test the scope of state anti-discrimination laws By Amy Howe .....The Supreme Court on Monday will revisit a long-simmering tension between legal protections for LGBTQ people and the rights of business owners who oppose same-sex marriage. The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, is a challenge by a Colorado website designer to a state law that bars businesses that are open to the public from discriminating against gay people or announcing their intent to do so. The designer, Lorie Smith, argues that subjecting her to the law would violate her right to free speech. Colorado counters that exempting Smith from the law would open a Pandora’s box that would “upend antidiscrimination law – and other laws too.” FIRE: FIRE asks Supreme Court to uphold free speech on public sidewalks By Abby Smith .....Last week, FIRE filed an amicus curiae — “friend of the court” — brief, asking the Supreme Court of the United States to hear a case concerning whether a public university can restrict access to a public sidewalk on its campus. If the Court takes the case, the result will have big implications for campus speech everywhere, not just on public city sidewalks The Courts Fox News: FBI met weekly with Big Tech ahead of the 2020 election, agent testifies By Brianna Herlihy .....An FBI agent testified to Republican attorneys general this week that the FBI held weekly meetings with Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley ahead of the 2020 presidential election to discuss "disinformation" on social media and ask about efforts to censor that information. On Tuesday, lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies "under the guise of combating misinformation" to achieve greater censorship. IRS People United for Privacy: IRS Chief Refuses Sheldon Whitehouse’s Demand to Police Speech .....Should a nonprofit organization lose its tax status if it hosts an event without masking and social distancing? Should Americans who give to social causes be tracked in a central database operated by the IRS? If you answered yes to these questions, you may be on the wrong website, but you also have a powerful ally in the halls of Congress. His name is Sheldon Whitehouse and he’s on a crusade to strip First Amendment rights from Americans who disagree with him. In his new book, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court – described by Publishers Weekly as a “polemic” that “strikes a fiery tone” but “doesn’t break new ground” and “works best at establishing its author’s partisan bona fides” – the Senator from Rhode Island rails against conservative nonprofits for daring to protect the privacy of their members while speaking out about pending judicial nominations and court cases. The horror. Notably, the Senator is not so averse to using his own considerable influence to try to capture the federal bureaucracy and muzzle groups that stand in his way. The Daily Signal reports this week on 176 pages of newly revealed correspondence between Whitehouse, other Senate Democrats, and the IRS in which the Senators repeatedly attempt to pressure the IRS into targeting nonprofits and taxpayers for their political views. Some of the complaints are simply absurd: Online Speech Platforms Politico: ‘This will be awesome’: Musk leaks Twitter's Hunter Biden files By Ben Schreckinger .....Elon Musk is stoking controversy on a new front, this time revealing sensitive internal deliberations at Twitter around Hunter Biden’s personal computer files in the fall of 2020… The internal company discussions, which predate Musk’s ownership, offer insight on the dissent and confusion inside Twitter as it responded to the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s files in the closing weeks of the last presidential campaign. POLITICO has not independently verified the communications, which were given to Substack writer Matt Taibbi, a longtime critic of online censorship and mainstream media outlets. Taibbi unspooled portions of the leak in a lengthy Twitter thread on Friday night. New York Times: Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and a Very Modern Media Maelstrom By Michael M. Grynbaum .....Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop. National Review: Thoughts on the ‘Twitter Files’ By Jeffrey Blehar .....Taibbi’s “piece,” such as it was (the qualification is necessary because it was unveiled on Twitter), contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It confirms that Twitter’s employees were progressives trapped in a progressive bubble making indefensibly ad hoc decisions on the basis of their left-wing political priors that resulted in the disgraceful censorship of information that turned out to be both 100 percent accurate and of acute national political interest. Notably, Taibbi’s reporting seems (at least preliminarily) to clear the Biden campaign team of involvement in the decision to censor the New York Post’s story, establishing an important fact in the case (albeit not in the direction certain partisans might have hoped). New York Post: Poll of congress members foretold Twitter ‘blood bath’ for censoring Hunter Biden story By Victor Nava .....Internal emails made public by CEO Elon Musk Friday reveal that a lobbying group for major tech companies including Twitter, Meta, TikTok, and Google, informed executives of the social media giant that a “blood bath” awaited them in congressional hearings over the company’s censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop expose. Days after the story was published in October 2020, Carl Szabo, the head of NetChoice, told Twitter public policy chief Lauren Culbertson that his group polled 12 members of Congress, nine Republicans and three Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.” ... The trade association noted that lawmakers were frustrated that big tech companies had “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.” Szabo also informed Culbertson that Twitter’s decision to censor the laptop story was being viewed as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment,” a reference to the jaw-dropping audio of then-candidate Donald Trump making lewd comments on the show “Access Hollywood” back in 2005 that was revealed weeks before the 2016 election. “It’s tech’s Access Hollywood moment and it has no Hillary to hide behind,” Szabo wrote, quoting a congressional staffer. 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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