This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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In the News
By Joshua Q. Nelson
.....A school district was forced to pay over $100,000 in legal fees after banning moms from exposing pornographic material at school board meetings.
Forsyth County School District [FSC] agreed to pay attorney’s fees in a federal lawsuit brought by a group of parents who were censored at school board meetings.
The group, called the Mama Bears, claimed in the federal lawsuit that their First Amendment rights were violated and won the case due to the legal representation of the Institute for Free Speech.
The Mama Bears settled a federal lawsuit against the Georgia school district after one of the group’s members was barred from reading sexually explicit excerpts at school board meetings.
FCS will pay the Mama Bears' attorneys $107,500 and the plaintiffs nominal damages of $17.91.
"Fee shifting is an important feature of our civil rights laws; and successful plaintiffs who are able to show that government officials censored them are entitled to having their attorneys’ fees paid by the wrongdoers, just like for any other form of illegal discrimination. We hope that school-board members and their lawyers take note," Institute for Free Speech senior attorney Del Kolde told Fox News Digital.
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New from the Institute for Free Speech
By Alec Greven
.....Here’s yet another sign that your First Amendment rights are under attack by politicians – a ban on political signs.
Arizona State Senator Steve Kaiser proposed a bill to ban political signs from public property – streets, medians, and rights of way. But other signs, such as real estate open house signs, can stay.
That’s blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Government officials can’t pick and choose speech they do or don’t like. By targeting political speech, the legislation does not even try to pretend it is a legitimate use of state power.
Remarkably, Arizona politicians have tried these unconstitutional schemes before. In a unanimous 2015 Supreme Court case Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the Supreme Court struck down a Gilbert, Arizona law for treating religious services signs differently than other signs.
But this bill speaks to a broader impulse of many incumbents; they use their free speech rights to climb the ladder to political power and then yank those rights away so challengers can’t follow them. The proposal would surely benefit incumbents, like Steve Kaiser, who already benefit from name recognition and easier access to the media.
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Supreme Court
By Adam Liptak
.....In a case with the potential to alter the very structure of the internet, the Supreme Court did not appear ready on Tuesday to limit a law that protects social media platforms from lawsuits over their users’ posts.
In the course of a sprawling argument lasting almost three hours, the justices seemed to view the positions taken by the two sides as too extreme, giving them a choice between exposing search engines and Twitter shares to liability on the one hand and protecting algorithms that promote pro-ISIS content on the other.
At the same time, they expressed doubts about their own competence to find a middle ground.
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The Courts
By Paul Farhi, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison
.....The disclosure of emails and texts in which Fox News executives and personalities disparaged the same election conspiracies being floated on their shows has greatly increased the chances that a defamation case against the network will succeed, legal experts say.
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Congress
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn
.....Substack journalist Matt Taibbi fired back at comments made by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who was swept up in the latest Twitter Files.
On Saturday, Taibbi revealed an October 2018 email from then-Twitter's public policy manager saying that he "spoke" with King's campaign manager as the senator was seeking reelection regarding a lengthy list of what were dubbed "suspicious Twitter accounts" that the campaign flagged.
The list, posted in a Google doc that also included flagged Facebook users and groups, labeled hundreds of Twitter accounts as either "bots" or "trolls." Reasons why the tweets were flagged varied from "Rand Paul visit excitement" and "Mentions immigration," to being followed by his Republican opponent.
King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, claims his campaign was merely trying to combat "misinformation."
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Candidates and Campaigns
By Caitlin Reilly
.....FTX executives, including former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, spent at least $1 million on contributions across the political spectrum in the weeks before the company’s bankruptcy, including a large donation to Senate Republican leadership.
From the end of September to the November midterm elections, which fell just days before FTX declared bankruptcy, almost 180 candidates reported donations from top FTX executives, who in many cases maxed out their contributions to campaigns and leadership political action committees.
That flurry of spending was the cap to at least $72.1 million in campaign and PAC donations over the two-year midterm cycle from the company and its executives, according to Federal Election Commission filings. More than 40 percent of the members of the 118th Congress received financial support from FTX executives and staff in the two years through direct contributions or money spent by super PACs in favor of their campaigns.
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By Maggie Haberman
.....Former President Donald J. Trump, who throughout his business career had a reputation for not paying lawyers, spent roughly $10 million from his political action committee on his own legal fees last year, federal election filings show...
According to some campaign finance experts, having the PAC continue to pay his legal bills now that he is a candidate would be seen as a contribution to him, and therefore be subject to legal limits.
“Payments by a PAC that exceed the contribution limit are contributions to the candidate and are unlawful,” said Jason Torchinsky, a campaign finance expert and lawyer with the firm Holtzman Vogel, referring to the limit on individual donations to candidates, which is set at $3,300 for the current two-year political cycle.
Adav Noti, of the Campaign Legal Center, a group that has called on the Federal Election Commission to more strictly enforce the rules on personal use of campaign donations, called what is permissible a “gray area.” The Federal Election Commission has yet to provide the guidance on the issue that campaign finance experts have sought.
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The States
By Jeremy Turley
.....North Dakota lawmakers have advanced legislation that would compel greater public reporting from a high-powered campaign finance group bankrolled by Gov. Doug Burgum.
The state House of Representatives on Monday, Feb. 20, unanimously approved House Bill 1441, which would require well-funded multicandidate committees to disclose how they spend their campaign cash. The proposal will move onto the Senate next month.
Multicandidate committees must report their donor list, but they are not legally required to reveal which candidates they support or oppose. The vast majority of the groups registered under the designation in North Dakota are affiliated with a political party or a series of candidates, but the Dakota Leadership PAC, which derives nearly all of its funding from Burgum, is a notable exception…
The bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Kasper, R-Fargo, would mandate that multicandidate committees publicly name the candidates or measures they support or oppose with expenditures exceeding $5,000. The groups also would have to clarify which medium they use for advertising expenditures, whether radio, mail, television, printed media or social media.
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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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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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