In the News

The Dennis Michael Lynch Podcast: DML Podcast Nov 30

[Ed. note: Our client Amy Kneessy in Brevard Moms for Liberty v. Brevard Public Schools is interviewed about the case. Segment begins at 25:38. Learn more about the case here.]

Free Speech

The Bulwark: The Right’s New Legal Crusade Against Corporate Free Speech

By Corbin Barthold

In September the conservative legal movement won an outstanding victory at the Federal Election Commission. When corporations speak about politics, conservatives have long argued, their speech is not a campaign contribution under federal election law. The September ruling confirmed that the respondent corporation may promote some political views, and not others, when it has a valid commercial reason for doing so. Three of the six commissioners went further. They argued that the corporation has a First Amendment right to speak about politics, including elections, without FEC oversight.

If you are aware of this case, you almost certainly haven’t heard it described as a victory for conservatives. Indeed, the Republican National Committee was on the losing side. It was challenging Twitter’s suppression of an October 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Among the few on the right who even noticed the decision, a common reaction was to imply corruption. “The regime has acquitted itself,” wrote Sohrab Ahmari, then an editor at the Post. A Fox News host suggested that then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey go to prison…

The right’s budding legal crusade against corporate free speech is off to a slow start. Certain GOP state lawmakers, it is true, can boast about getting a couple anti-Big Tech bills signed…

These bills target perceived political opponents for their perceived political beliefs. We know this because the bills’ supporters tell us so.

The Media

New York Times: Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars

By Ben Smith

On Friday afternoons this fall, top American news executives have dialed into a series of off-the-record Zoom meetings led by Harvard academics whose goal is to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” …

[The first session] consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign…

The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary…

While some academics use the term carefully, “misinformation” in the case of the lost laptop was more or less synonymous with “material passed along by Trump aides.” And in that context, the phrase “media manipulation” refers to any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike…

The focus on who’s saying something, and how they’re spreading their claims, can pretty quickly lead Silicon Valley engineers to slap the “misinformation” label on something that is, in plainer English, true…

We don’t need to mystify the old-fashioned practice of news judgment with a new terminology. There’s a danger in adopting jargony new frameworks we haven’t really thought through. The job of reporters isn’t, ultimately, to put neat labels on the news. It’s to report out what’s actually happening, as messy and unsatisfying as that can be.

Lobbying

Politico: These days, Capitol Hill townhomes aren’t for living in. They’re for lobbying.

By Hailey Fuchs and Emily Birnbaum

Just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, is a five-bedroom townhouse with an unobtrusive presence on New Jersey Ave S.E. To the casual observer, it looks like any other home in this quaint, historic neighborhood in Washington D.C. But this one has a small placard and doormat distinguishing it from the row of other residences.

The house is the property of the Allied Pilots Association, a union for American Airlines pilots…

“Just me personally, I’ve probably had 20 members of Congress say, ‘Hey, can we do an event over there?’” said Brian Bell, a pilot-advocate for the association. “Now, we want to make sure everybody knows we have a permanent presence on the Hill, being the largest airline in the world, and what this will allow us to do as far as an advocacy perspective from the Allied Pilots Association, now we can entertain members of Congress, both sides of the aisle.”…

[T]here’s little enforcement in this area of the law. “The FEC just doesn’t have the time to sit around and monitor whether or not a townhouse is being rented out at a fair market value for a campaign fundraising event,” said Craig Holman, a campaign finance lobbyist with advocacy group Public Citizen. “It’s left to the discretion of the lobbyists and campaigns to determine what they want to charge. I suspect very frequently it’s way under fair market value.”

International

Edmonton Journal: Alberta’s new election bill silences UCP government’s critics

By Gil McGowan

The law in question is the innocuous-sounding Elections Statutes Amendment Act, or Bill 81. But it should really be called the “Anti-Democracy Gag Law.”…

Here’s how the bill works:

• [If] any group, from any point on the political spectrum, wants to spend more than $1,000 on public advocacy campaigns that includes criticism of the government or government policies, they must first register as a so-called third-party advertiser (TPA)…

• If civil society groups don’t register as TPAs — or if their applications to register as TPAs are rejected by the chief electoral officer (CEO) —they will be subject to fines of up to $100,000 per day if they decide to flout the law.

• Applications to form TPAs will be rejected if the CEO determines that a group is “affiliated” with a registered political party.

• Civil society groups will be deemed to be affiliated with a registered party if the group is mentioned in the “founding documents” of any registered party…

• Civil society groups will also be deemed to be affiliated to a registered party if any of their leaders also hold positions within a registered party (even if a civil society leader is volunteering for a party on their own personal time).

• Finally, and this is the kicker, groups will be deemed to be affiliates of a registered party — and therefore ineligible to register as TPAs — if they have “made public statements in support of or in opposition to a registered party.”

Online Speech Platforms

New York Times: Twitter will take down pictures of people posted without their permission.

By Kate Conger

A sweeping expansion of Twitter’s policy against posting private information was met with backlash shortly after the company announced it on Tuesday, as Twitter users questioned whether the policy would be practical to enforce.

Twitter’s new policy states that photos or videos of private individuals that are posted without their permission will be taken down at their request. Twitter’s rules already prohibit the posting of private information like addresses, phone numbers and medical records.

“When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it,” Twitter’s new policy states. “This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.”…

The new policy will extend privacy rights to users in countries that do not have similar laws, a Twitter spokeswoman said. Under Twitter’s policy, a user could have a photo removed if it was used to harass them or if they simply did not like the photo.

Twitter plans to make exceptions for newsworthy images and videos, and the company will take into consideration whether the image was publicly available, was being used by traditional news outlets or was “relevant to the community.”

The States

New York Daily News: Cam-pain finance: Don’t risk weakening enforcement of NYC election rules; do improve transparency

By Daily News Editorial Board

Yesterday, the City Council considered a bill that the city’s Campaign Finance Board contends would weaken the agency’s audit function overseeing the public matching-fund program that handed out north of $125 million in this year’s contests. The bill’s backers swear it’s not true, that it’s entirely benign and all it does is move up the CFB’s annual budget request from the mayor’s executive budget in April to the mayor’s preliminary budget in January or February.

We don’t know who’s right, but we do know that the Council is too frequently happy to boost the cash into their coffers and ease the regulations tracking those public dollars. And we can think of 125 million reasons why it’s not worth the risk until the bill’s implications are known to all and agreed to by all. The top of that list is the fourth-place comptroller primary campaign of Brian Benjamin, now the lieutenant governor. His pal Gerald Migdol is now under federal criminal indictment for allegedly faking contributions to Benjamin to illegally pump up his matching dollars. As there’s a lot of money at stake, every cent must be carefully watched.

Cleveland.com: Ohio Elections Commission set to offer guidance on use of Bitcoin, Venmo by state political candidates

By Andrew J. Tobias

For the first time, the Ohio Elections Commission is set to offer official guidance to state political candidates on how they should handle Bitcoin and Venmo, two increasingly common ways of transferring money.

Candidates running for local or state offices can accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but must guarantee that whoever gave it to them is eligible to make campaign contributions in Ohio, according to a draft legal advisory set to be approved by the elections commission on Thursday.

It also must be reported as an in-kind contribution — a term that applies to non-cash contributions like food or services — but subject to maximum contribution limits as if it were a cash contribution, the draft advisory says. The value of the cryptocurrency, which can fluctuate wildly based on market forces, would be calculated based on how much it was worth when the campaign received it…

And when it comes to Venmo or other similar smartphone apps that can be used to directly send someone money, candidates can use them, but must set up a separate account to keep their personal and campaign funds separate. There are similar rules for traditional bank accounts.

Phil Richter, the director of the Ohio Elections Commission, said the advisories are being issued mostly as a precaution, in response to isolated questions.