This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].  

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.

The Hill: Tech groups ask Supreme Court to weigh in on Texas social media law

.....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.

“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. 

Law360: Ga. Judge Pauses AG's Probe Of NGO Election Spending

.....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.

Insider: FEC asks Congress to take action on 'scam PACs' that raise millions for campaigns but only enrich their founders

.....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.

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. 

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.

Wall Street Journal: Weaponizing Tax Returns

.....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 Popehat Report: In Defense Of Free Speech Pedantry

.....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.

National Review: Using the Civil-Rights Laws to Combat Suppression of Speech

.....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.

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

.....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

.....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."

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