Free Speech
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Platform Censorship Won’t Fix the Internet
By Corynne McSherry and India McKinney
Under the First Amendment, social media platforms and other online intermediaries have the right to decide what kinds of expression they will carry. But just because companies can act as judge and jury doesn’t mean they should.
We all want an Internet where we are free to meet, create, organize, share, associate, debate and learn. We want to make our voices heard in the way that technology now makes possible. No one likes being lied to or misled, or seeing hateful messages directed against them or flooded across our newsfeeds. We want our elections free from manipulation and for the speech of women and marginalized communities not to be silenced by harassment.
But we won’t make the Internet fairer or safer by pushing platforms into ever more aggressive efforts to police online speech. When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier.
Mic: What if we didn’t… have the First Amendment?
By Alison Durkee
Everywhere Americans look, the First Amendment is at the center of national conversations about the right way to live in America. Few tenets are as historically ingrained in American society as the First Amendment, but as the US struggles to find the limits and scope of its free speech, it’s worth considering: what would the country look like without the broad protections it provides? The possibilities may surprise you…
Freedom of speech, expression and association have historically been at the heart of every successful movement for social change in the U.S.
“Fundamentally, the protection of freedom of expression is necessary to a dynamic society,” U.S. Ben Wizener, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said in an interview with Mic. “Ideas that are deeply unpopular in one generation can become conventional wisdom in the next generation, because [the First Amendment’s] protection allowed us to push for change.”
Privacy
The Intercept: Facebook Is Demanding Personal Information From Political Advertisers, Raising Privacy Concerns
By Aída Chávez
Facebook officials on Tuesday briefed House Democratic Caucus staffers on the new authorization process to run political ads and official Facebook accounts on the social media platform, telling the press aides that beginning this summer, every page admin for both organic content and ads must be authorized through the two-week verification process available now. (This is assuming all congressional Facebook accounts fall under the rules for political and top-followed accounts.)
An invitation to the meeting, titled “Expanding Your Audience with Facebook Ads,” said the briefing was on “best practices for running Ads on official accounts.” In a back-and-forth with Facebook officials, some aides expressed concern over giving the social media platform their personal information and asked how their privacy would be protected and why the change was necessary, according to Democratic staffers who were at the meeting.
“It’s a huge overreach by Facebook,” one Democratic aide told The Intercept. “They’re going to solve the problem by collecting more data? To figure out if I’m a bot?”
Internet Speech Regulation
Sacramento Bee: Dark money loophole in internet advertising enabled Russian meddling. We must close it.
By Craig Holman
There remain no disclosures of campaign ads on one’s own web page, or of other forms of paid campaign advertising on the internet, or of ads that do not expressly say vote for or vote against, or of bots, apps or dark money groups…
Embarrassed that it fell asleep at the wheel, the FEC has finally decided unanimously to consider strengthening its disclaimer requirements for internet campaign ads, but it is still constrained by the law.
A far more sweeping remedy is the Honest Ads Act before Congress. This legislation would require disclosure of the funding sources of all kinds of online political ads, clear and conspicuous disclaimers on such ads and public records of political ads, funders and their target audiences.
Facebook and Twitter have endorsed the bill; Google seems supportive. Yet it is no secret that these companies, which have dramatically boosted their lobbying in Congress, would prefer self-regulation.
Let’s hope that Facebook, Twitter and Google are not saying one thing to the public – and urging Congress to back off behind closed doors. And let’s hope Congress wakes up to the critical need to shed light on the often mysterious, and sometimes nefarious, forces behind online political advertising.
FEC
Tampa Bay Times: FEC plans crackdown on zombie campaigns
By Christopher O’Donnell
The Federal Election Commission announced Wednesday that it will start scrutinizing the spending of what it called “dormant” campaigns – those maintained by former lawmakers who took advantage of a loophole that allowed them to hoard unspent campaign donations for years.
It comes after a Tampa Bay Times/10News WTSP investigation found that the agency ignored campaign finance reports showing more than 100 former politicians carried on spending donations even though they were no longer campaigning. In some cases, these zombie campaigns remained open for more than a decade…
The extra scrutiny of former lawmakers’ spending will begin in July. It will apply to the campaigns of former U.S House candidates who did not campaign or hold office during the previous two years and to former U.S. Senate and presidential candidates who have been out of office and not campaigning for four years.
Lobbying
Bloomberg: OMB’s Mulvaney Draws Bipartisan Criticism Over Lobbyist Comments
By Erik Wasson and Nancy Ognanovich
Mulvaney urged members of the American Bankers Association on Tuesday to press sympathetic lawmakers to help him reshape and rein in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s acting director of the bureau, in addition to his Office of Management and Budget duties. His remarks reinforce a public perception that politicians and officials in Washington pay greater attention to people and organizations with money.
“I’m going to put my old congressional hat on for a second,” Mulvaney said. “What you do here matters. We had a hierarchy in our office in Congress. If you are a lobbyist that never gave us money I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
For constituents who visited his congressional office from his home state of South Carolina, “I talked to you without exception — regardless of the financial contributions,” Mulvaney said. “People coming from back home to tell people in Congress what issues are important to them is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy and you have to continue to do it.”…
Budget office spokesman John Czwartacki defended Mulvaney’s remarks on Twitter Tuesday. “Director Mulvaney’s speech today to the ABA made it clear that being from ‘back home’ is ‘without exception’ more important than money when visiting congressmen,” he tweeted.
Congress
USA Today: ‘Facebook censored our free speech!’ Trump supporters Diamond and Silk tell Congress
By William Cummings
Social media personalities Diamond and Silk, known for their outspoken support of President Trump, took their act to Capitol Hill Thursday where they testified about their perceived political persecution by Facebook.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee called Lynette Hardaway (Diamond) and Rochelle Richardson (Silk) to speak at a hearing on “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms,” and held them up as examples of an anti-conservative bias they believe underlies Facebook and other social media companies’ content management decisions…
[Lieu] pointed out that the First Amendment protects citizens from government censorship but prohibits Congress from telling private companies how to manage their content.
Issa argued that, despite the First Amendment, Congress has a role in overseeing Facebook and he compared it to the way it oversees the airline industry.
“Every time there’s a plane crash, we have an obligation to look into it,” Issa said. “Do you think that we have a requirement to look into when things go wrong, essentially a plane crash of objectivity by new media?” he asked.
Washington Examiner: Gap between free speech and Facebook ensnares Diamond and Silk
By James Langford
The Constitution guarantees social media personalities Diamond and Silk, along with every other American, the right to free speech.
What it doesn’t do is promise a megaphone for that speech, whether from Facebook, Fox News, or a local newspaper…
Several of the hearing’s witnesses, including New York Law School professor Ari Waldman and Tech Freedom President Berin Szoka, said any attempt to impose a so-called Fairness Doctrine requiring equal access for all views would be ill-advised and, quite likely, unconstitutional.
Deciding what types of content to publish is what media companies do, Waldman noted. “We all may have a First Amendment right, subject to some limitations, to say what we want, free of government intervention or censorship. But we don’t have a First Amendment right to Facebook’s amplification of our words.” …
Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who called the hearing, conceded that the Constitution offers no clear protection for Facebook, Google or Twitter users whose content is restricted by the companies.
“We must nevertheless weigh as a nation whether the standards they apply endanger our free and open society and its culture of freedom of expression,” he said.
New York Times: Republicans on House Intelligence Panel Clear Trump Campaign in Russian Meddling
By Nicholas Fandos and Mark Mazzetti
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee found no evidence during a monthslong investigation that the Trump campaign aided Russia’s election meddling, the lawmakers concluded in a 250-page report released on Friday that assails President Trump’s political rivals and criticizes the F.B.I. and the intelligence community for their responses to Moscow’s interference.
In their own dissenting views, Democrats on the committee accused the Republicans of prematurely closing the investigation out of a desire to protect Mr. Trump and asserted that eagerness by Trump campaign associates to accept offers of Russian assistance suggest “a consciousness of wrongfulness, if not illegality.”
Wall Street Journal: Sen. Bob Menendez Admonished By Senate Ethics Committee
By Natalie Andrews
The Senate Ethics Committee, led by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.), sent a public “letter of admonition” to Mr. Menendez, saying he “knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value from” Salomon Melgen, a longtime political supporter.
Mr. Menendez’s office didn’t return a request for comment.
The rebuke comes about five months after a federal jury deadlocked in a corruption trial of Mr. Menendez. He faced 18 counts, including conspiracy, bribery, fraud and honest services fraud, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The Justice Department decided not to seek a retrial.
During the eight-week trial, prosecutors alleged that Dr. Melgen, who was also charged, lavished the senator with trips on his private plane, luxury Caribbean vacations, a $4,900 stay in a fancy Paris hotel and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations…
Defense attorneys for the men argued the government was misconstruing a longstanding and genuine friendship between the defendants. But the ethics committee concluded that: “Your assistance to Dr. Melgen under these circumstances demonstrated poor judgment and it risked undermining the public’s confidence in the Senate.”
