The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech December 12, 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 Courthouse News: Supreme Court to review criminalization of speech in illegal immigration By Kelsey Reichmann .....After passing up on the issue two years ago, the Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the Biden administration's bid for the country to criminalize, again, the encouragement of illegal immigration. The Courts CBS Detroit: Judge orders City of Eastpointe mayor to not block residents from public comment By Cryss Walker .....A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to the City of Eastpointe and Mayor Owens Wednesday, ordering that residents not be blocked from praising or criticizing public officials during public comment. .. Councilmember Cardi Demonaco was at the September meeting that abruptly ended. He says the right of public comment should never be interrupted if it doesn't illicit harm, like hate speech. Daily Beast: Failed GOP Candidate Ordered to Pay $115,000 to Candace Owens By Justin Baragona .....Former GOP congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik’s defamation lawsuit against right-wing provocateur Candace Owens, who accused Klacik of being a strip club “madame” who spent campaign funds on cocaine, has been tossed out by a Tennessee judge with prejudice. Not only is Klacik unable to file similar complaints against Owens going forward, but the judge also granted the right-wing personality’s petition to dismiss Klacik’s complaint pursuant to the Tennessee Public Participation Act, the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Such laws allow defendants the ability to “dismiss meritless lawsuits—known as ‘SLAPPs’ or ‘Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation’—filed against them for exercising their First Amendment rights.” Washington Examiner: University of Idaho pays out $90K to settle free speech lawsuit with Christian group By Jeremiah Poff .....The University of Idaho agreed to pay $90,000 to settle a lawsuit that was filed by three Christian students and a professor who were hit with a no-contact order after expressing opposition to same-sex marriage. The settlement, disclosed this week, resolves a lawsuit filed by Peter Perlot, Mark Miller, and Ryan Alexander, who are part of the Christian Legal Society, and their faculty adviser Richard Seamon in April after the university issued them a no-contact order for engaging with a law student who questioned why the group required members to maintain that marriage is between one man and one woman. Federal Election Commission: District Court issues opinions in Campaign Legal Center v. FEC (Case No. 22-1976) and Campaign Legal Center v. FEC, et. al (Case No. 19-2336) .....The United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday issued opinions in two cases brought by the Campaign Legal Center against the Commission. Online Speech Platforms National Review: Elon Musk Is Right By Charles C.W. Cooke .....Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness… Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms. If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. Reason: In Defense of Algorithms By Elizabeth Nolan Brown .....Algorithms, especially those used by search engines and social media, have become a strange new front in the culture war. And at the heart of that battle is the idea of control. Algorithms, critics warn, influence individual behavior and reshape political reality, acting as a mysterious digital spell cast by Big Tech over a populace that would otherwise be saner, smarter, less polarized, less hateful, less radical. Algorithms, in this telling, transform ordinary people into terrible citizens. But the truth is much more complex and much less alarming. Despite the dire warnings found in headlines and congressional pronouncements, a wealth of research and data contradicts the idea that algorithms are destroying individual minds and America's social fabric. At worst, they help reveal existing divides, amplify arguments some would prefer to stay hidden, and make it harder for individuals to fully control what they see online. At best, they help make us better informed, better engaged, and actually less likely to encounter extremist content. Algorithms aren't destroying democracy. They just might be holding it together. Atlantic: The Meta Oversight Board Has Some Genuinely Smart Suggestions By Kate Klonick .....A little more than 14 months after The Wall Street Journal first published the “Facebook Files”—the reporting series that exposed the inner workings of the site’s content-moderation practices—the Meta Oversight Board has finally released its opinion on the controversial and opaque cross-check program that gave preferential treatment to certain users of the site, even when they openly flouted the site’s community standards. For months, online-speech experts worried that the board’s decision would fall short by recommending the oversimplified solution of terminating the program entirely, or suggesting nonspecific methods of reform. But the opinion, which lays out, according to the board, more than two dozen concrete steps for which types of entities can qualify for such protections—and who will select them—exceeded expectations, offering serious guidance for one of online speech’s toughest questions. The States OpenSecrets: State ballot measures attracted $945 million during 2022 midterm elections By Rayna Cohen .....State ballot measures attracted $945 million during the 2022 election cycle. Sixty-two measures in states across the country covered topics such as abortion, cannabis use and online sports betting. Voters approved 64.5% of those measures, and some of the ballot measures with the biggest financial backers failed. 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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