The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech December 19, 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]. In the News The Oregonian: UO employee who temporarily blocked PSU professor’s Twitter account, and the professor who sued testify in court By Maxine Bernstein .....A Portland State University professor got his day in court Friday to challenge his temporary ban from the University of Oregon’s Twitter account on equity, drawing an accusation that he was using his lawsuit simply to promote his conservative agenda. Bruce Gilley, a professor of political science and a champion of race blindness, took umbrage when he was blocked from the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion Account for a comment he made on June 14. Gilley and his lawyers, including one from the Institute for Free Speech based in Washington, D.C., contend the UO employee who bumped Gilley’s Twitter account for 60 days violated his First Amendment rights. Supreme Court The Hill: Tech groups ask Supreme Court to weigh in on Texas social media law By Julia Shapero .....Two tech industry groups asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to weigh in on a Texas law that would limit major social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms. The Computer and Communications Association (CCIA) and NetChoice petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case over Texas House Bill 20, which seeks to ban social media platforms from “censoring” users based on their political views. The law was set to go into effect in December 2021 but has remained tied up in court for the last year over allegations that it violates the First Amendment — arguments that CCIA and NetChoice reiterated in Thursday’s petition to the high court. “HB20 infringes the core First Amendment rights of Petitioners’ members by denying them editorial control over their own websites, while forcing them to publish speech they do not wish to disseminate,” CCIA and NetChoice said in the brief. A district court judge initially blocked the Texas law from going into effect but was later overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Courts Law360: Ga. Judge Pauses AG's Probe Of NGO Election Spending By Peter McGuire .....A Georgia federal judge has temporarily barred Peach State authorities from enforcing state campaign finance laws against a pair of nonprofits founded by Stacey Abrams accused of illegally spending millions of dollars to support her 2018 run for governor, ruling that the state's definition of political campaign committees is unconstitutional. New York Times: U.S. Scrutinizes Political Donations by Sam Bankman-Fried and Allies By Kenneth P. Vogel and Ken Bensinger .....Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are seeking information from Democrats and Republicans about donations from the disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and two former executives at the companies he co-founded. In the days after Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested on Monday and charged with violations including a major campaign finance scheme, the prosecutors reached out to representatives for campaigns and committees that had received millions of dollars from Mr. Bankman-Fried, his colleagues and their companies. A law firm representing some of the most important Democratic political organizations — including the party’s official campaign arms, its biggest super PACs and the campaigns of high-profile politicians such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries — received an email from a prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. The email sought information about donations from Mr. Bankman-Fried, his colleagues and companies, according to people familiar with the request, who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing law enforcement matter. FEC Insider: FEC asks Congress to take action on 'scam PACs' that raise millions for campaigns but only enrich their founders By Charles R. Davis .....In a rare case of bipartisan unity, the Federal Election Commission this week unanimously urged lawmakers to tackle so-called "scam PACs" that claim to support a political candidate but end up enriching the founders and their friends. Per the FEC, such political action committees "solicit contributions with the promise of supporting candidates," but then disclose "minimal or no candidate support activities while engaging in significant and continuous fundraising." The FEC's six commissioners — three Democrats, three Republicans — believe lawmakers should grant them the authority to directly address such schemes, as well as consider whether it should even be legal to raise funds for a PAC that go almost exclusively to vendors, according to legislative recommendations they approved on Friday. The recommendations urge Congress to explicitly define the PACs' fundraising tactics and diversion of money raised as fraudulent. In April 2021, the FBI warned that the scam-PAC problem is "on the rise." Fox News: FEC needs to reopen Twitter probe now that documents Musk released show company may have outright lied By Hans A. von Spakovsky .....Last year, the [FEC] dismissed a complaint filed against Twitter and its executives that claimed they had violated federal law. Given the recent public disclosures of internal as well as external Twitter communications with campaign and party organizations, the FEC should reopen that investigation. It must determine if that dismissal was based on false information provided by Twitter. IRS Bloomberg Tax: IRS Accidentally Releases 112,000 Taxpayers’ Private Data Again By Chris Cioffi .....Confidential data of about 112,000 taxpayers inadvertently published by the IRS over the summer was mistakenly republished in late November and remained online until early December, the IRS disclosed Thursday. Form 990-T data that was supposed to stay private had been taken offline but made its way back to the IRS site when a contractor uploaded an old file that still included most of the private information, a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders said. The agency is required to make Form 990-Ts filed by nonprofit groups available online but is supposed to keep the form filed by individuals private; in both cases, the agency made that information available too. Wall Street Journal: Weaponizing Tax Returns By The Editorial Board .....Many norms have been broken in American politics in recent years, and one of them is the use of private tax returns as a political weapon. The trend is destructive, as a pair of events this week illustrate. The first is a useful lawsuit by hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin against the Internal Revenue Service seeking damages for the leak of his tax records to ProPublica. In June 2021 and in articles since, the left-wing website has published the confidential tax data of Mr. Griffin, who runs Citadel Securities, and other wealthy Americans. ProPublica used the tax data to argue that the rich don’t pay enough taxes, and the first article came out when Democrats were making the case for a wealth tax. ProPublica has never disclosed how it obtained the tax records, and the IRS claims to be investigating the leak but has produced nothing. Free Expression The Popehat Report: In Defense Of Free Speech Pedantry By Ken White .....UCLA Professor Eugene Volokh, probably the most influential and important academic voice on First Amendment issues, has been soliciting feedback on a draft article Free Speech Rules, Free Speech Culture, And Legal Education. In the article he argues that law schools and law students should be more open to serious discussions of controversial ideas in order to produce more capable lawyers. The article itself is well worth reading, but I want to talk about something more meta: the title, and the clarity it seeks. It’s good and sensible to debate the contours of free speech. But we waste a lot of time not on substance, but on meta-quarrels over identifying what we’re arguing about. Whenever a public figure makes a dubious pronouncement about free speech, the first reaction is not to evaluate it on its merits, but to dispute whether the person was offering a descriptive statement of the law (which can be true or false) or a normative statement about the culture (which cannot). People interested — say rather, obsessed — with the topic can often suss it out from context, but the distinction is often opaque to most. Online Speech Platforms National Review: Using the Civil-Rights Laws to Combat Suppression of Speech By Andrew C. McCarthy .....In the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Columbia Law School’s Philip Hamburger had a characteristically insightful op-ed on the possibility of using the civil-rights conspiracy statute (section 241 of the federal criminal code) to prosecute social-media platforms and law-enforcement agents who collaborate to suppress political speech. That’s what Twitter and the FBI appear to have done in the run-up to the 2020 election: burying news about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its content’s proof of Joe Biden’s connection to the Biden family business practice of cashing in on the now-president’s political influence. The professor’s idea is an excellent one. It is certainly preferable to the well-meaning but counterproductive calls for a regulatory framework that would have government bureaucrats monitoring communications on social-media platforms. Jonathan Turley: Harvard/Harris: Two-Thirds of Voters Believe Social Media Engaged in Politically-Motivated Censorship and Demand Congressional Action .....The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is out this week and Mark Penn and his colleagues have some interesting results to share. Despite the refusal of many in the media to cover the Twitter files, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship. This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout. Politico: Musk reinstates majority of suspended journalist accounts By Rebecca Kern .....Elon Musk reinstated on Saturday the Twitter accounts of most of the journalists he previously suspended after he had alleged they were “doxxing” his location information by reporting on the removal of an account that tracked his private jet. Reason: Twitter Files: The FBI Frequently Flagged Joke Tweets, Asked for Moderation By Robby Soave .....FBI agents communicated regularly with content moderators at Twitter, and frequently asked for tweets to be taken down for allegedly violating the platforms' policies against election-related misinformation. The conversations were so numerous—including emails and weekly meetings—that a top Twitter staffer came to describe the relationship between the company and law enforcement as "government-industry sync." That's according to the latest installment of the Twitter Files, which was released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday. 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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