In the News
Communications Daily: Fla. Reversal on Disney Carve-Out Shakes Up Social Media Case
By Adam Bender
An eleventh-hour amendment won’t help Florida overcome constitutional problems with its law making it illegal for social media sites to deplatform political candidates and requiring them to be transparent about policing, and could even help tech industry challengers’ case, opponents of the law said Monday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill Friday to remove a controversial exemption for theme park owners like Disney, less than week before a Thursday-scheduled argument at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on a lower court’s preliminary injunction. The move removed one distraction from defensible parts of the law, said Del Kolde, Institute for Free Speech (IFS) senior attorney…
Dispensing with Disney’s exemption “allows the court to focus on more of the other issues,” said Kolde. IFS opposes “any kind of law that creates special classes of speakers,” including the law’s Disney exemption and special treatment for political candidates and news organizations, he said. The group filed a September amicus brief asking the court to cut those aspects while upholding the law’s other parts, including requirements that platforms disclose their content moderation rules and explain why certain posts are removed, and then follow their rules consistently. Social websites are different from news publications with editorial discretion, said Kolde.
It’s tough to predict what the court will decide, said Kolde. “I don’t think the 11th Circuit has a particular reputation for being clearcut one way or the other.”
Congress
Washington Examiner: Hawley asks Musk to issue a public audit of Twitter’s censorship
By Heather Hamilton
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley wrote Elon Musk after the billionaire purchased Twitter, asking him to generate and release a public audit of the social media platform’s “egregious censorship.”
The Republican senator shared his letter on Twitter, calling on Musk to “open the books.”
“Twitter has largely evaded public accountability over the past several years,” Hawley wrote in his letter. “Since I’ve been in the Senate, I’ve sent a number of oversight inquiries to the company. These letters cover subjects as diverse as content moderation policies, viewpoint discrimination, suppression of content, and Twitter’s own security. Twitter, not surprisingly, has effectively ignored these requests.”
Hawley’s letter specifically requested that the audit address who at Twitter is responsible for suppressing the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop and business dealings story, along with an analysis of how many accounts were either suspended or shadow-banned and whether the results indicate a political bias.
FEC
The Hill: Republicans file FEC complaint over alleged Google censorship of fundraising emails
By Max Greenwood
Republicans are filing a complaint alleging that Google’s email platform unfairly censored GOP fundraising emails by filtering messages to users’ spam folders at a far higher rate than it did Democratic fundraising pleas.
The complaint, dated April 26, was filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as part of a joint effort by the Republican National Committee (RNC), National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
The complaint cites a study from researchers at North Carolina State University that found that, throughout the 2020 election cycle, Gmail allowed the vast majority of emails from Democrats into users’ inboxes, while more than two-thirds of emails from Republicans were filtered into spam folders.
The complaint argues that, in doing so, Google effectively “made illegal, corporate in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign and Democrat candidates across the country by its overwhelmingly – and indefensibly – disproportionate suppression of Republican candidate emails.”
The Courts
Politico: Judge rejects Elon Musk’s bid to end SEC tweet settlement
By Katy O’Donnell
A federal judge on Wednesday denied Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s request to terminate an agreement he entered with the SEC in 2018 requiring him to run certain Twitter posts by securities lawyers for pre-approval…
“With regard to the First Amendment argument, it is undisputed in this case that Musk’s tweets are at least presumptively ‘protected speech,’” U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman wrote in his opinion denying the motion Wednesday. “At the same time, however, even Musk concedes that his free speech rights do not permit him to engage in speech that is or could ‘be considered fraudulent or otherwise violative of the securities laws.’”
Liman noted that parties can waive First Amendment rights in consent decrees as the one Musk has with the SEC.
“Musk’s argument that the SEC has used the consent decree to harass him and to launch investigations of his speech is likewise meritless and, in this case, particularly ironic,” Liman wrote. “The Supreme Court has instructed that ‘modification should not be granted where a party relies upon events that actually were anticipated at the time it entered into a decree.’”
Biden Administration
By Katelyn Caralle
President Biden has set up a ‘disinformation’ board headed-up by a woke so-called expert who’s against free speech and tried to pour cold water on the Hunter laptop scandal.
Nina Jankowicz will head The Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board as executive director, Politico Playbook reported Wednesday morning.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not disclose any powers that would be granted to the dystopian-sounding board while addressing lawmakers on Wednesday.
He explained that the board would work to tackle disinformation ahead of the November midterms, particularly in Hispanic communities…
The Russia disinformation expert previously called the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter a ‘Trump campaign product’.
This is causing questions over Jankowicz’s ability to accurately judge disinformation now that several sources have come out confirming the validity of Hunter’s laptop.
The States
FIRE (“So to Speak” Podcast): Ep. 159 Disney and Elon Musk
Does Disney have free speech rights? And did Florida violate the First Amendment when it punished the company for its political activism?
Elon Musk is buying Twitter. What should free speech advocates make of that?
Recurring guest and famed First Amendment scholar Robert Corn-Revere is here to break it all down for us. He’s a partner at the law firm Davis Wright-Tremaine, a member of FIRE’s Advisory Council, and the author of “The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma.”
