In the News
Business Insider: How anyone with a computer and 15 free minutes can create their very own weaponized federal document
By Dave Levinthal
A golden age of sorts for fake political committees began in 2015 after polling firm Public Policy Polling included an independent presidential candidate, who called himself “Deez Nuts,” in a poll of North Carolinians.
After “Deez Nuts” – later revealed to be a 15-year-old prankster named Brady Olson – polled in the high single digits a rash of copycats and inspired wiseacres began registering bogus political committees with the FEC…
Why can’t federal officials just deep-six a new political committee if they’re almost certain – from its name alone – that it’s bupkis?
Blame the Constitution.
“The rules of the road are what they are because of the First Amendment,” said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit organization that advocates for laissez-faire campaign finance laws.
Freedom of Association
Christianity Today: Where Two or More Are Gathered, the First Amendment Should Protect Them
By Lael Weinberger
[Luke] Sheahan’s new book, Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism, makes the case for the importance of voluntary associations in our political landscape. Rather than the dichotomy of individual and state, Sheahan offers an account of society with three components: individual, state, and association. He argues that the American judiciary in particular has failed to recognize the importance of associations. Finally, he suggests ways to do better in the future. That’s where the First Amendment comes in, with its promises of protection for freedom of speech, religion, and assembly…
Sheahan’s critique of existing law focuses on the Supreme Court’s treatment of associations under the First Amendment. The First Amendment freedom of association protects freedom of speech and assembly (as well as religious freedom and press freedom). But the Supreme Court has done very little to recognize assembly as a right on its own. Instead, it has largely replaced references to freedom of assembly with references to freedom of association…
In place of the existing precedents, Sheahan argues that the courts should recognize associations, not just individuals, as bearers of First Amendment rights. He calls this “First Amendment pluralism.” These rights shouldn’t depend on the association being “expressive” (that is, primarily concerned with speech).
Free Speech
Wall Street Journal: Bonfire of the Liberals
By The Editorial Board
America’s liberal intelligentsia thought the election of Donald Trump meant America would re-enact “1984,” but it’s starting to look more like “Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell’s account of the left’s internecine savagery during the Spanish Civil War. Witness the spectacular online meltdown that followed a liberal open letter opposing left-wing attacks on free speech…
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a frequent New York Times contributor who had signed the letter, pleaded for forgiveness on Twitter. She had not realized that not all the signatories were of the caliber of the socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky, she wrote. “The consequences,” she added, “are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”
A Tufts University historian, Kerri Greenidge, tweeted that she did “not endorse” the counterrevolutionary document (without denying having signed it) and asked that her name be removed. Others may yet face consequences. Matt Yglesias, a co-founder of the millennial progressive website Vox, was among the signatories. One of his colleagues wrote in an open letter to the publication’s editors that because the Harper’s letter was signed by “several prominent anti-trans voices” Mr. Yglesias’s signature “makes me feel less safe at Vox.” …
There is a significant layer of hypocrisy here; many free-speech liberals tolerate left-wing mobs when their furies are aimed at conservatives. But now that the purge of conservatives from America’s flagship intellectual institutions is almost complete, new enemies are needed, and it’s no surprise that the left is descending into mutual back-stabbing.
Our hope is that the moderate elements can fend off the woke attack. Society benefits when both its left and right coalitions accept basic free-speech principles.
Reason: The Reaction to the Harper’s Letter on Cancel Culture Proves Why It Was Necessary
By Jesse Singal
I kept thinking about this expression [“a hit dog will holler”] as I watched a sizable subset of the online progressive intelligentsia respond with intense fury, disbelief, and indignation to an open letter published online yesterday by Harper’s magazine. The letter…was simply a stout defense of liberal values from people primarily on the left at a time it feels like these values are under threat…
The reason people are so mad at the pro-free-speech letter is that they aren’t really in favor of free speech. Not when it comes to anyone who isn’t their ally, at least…
[One] example of the hit-dog-hollering principle in action yesterday: “i really wonder if some of the people who signed this thought long and hard about whose names they’d appear next to,” tweeted Matt Gabriele, who teaches medieval studies and chairs the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech.
Again, the amount of stuff being revealed, right in the open, if you only care to look, is surprising: Gabriele, who holds an important, gatekeeping position at a major American university, wants people to think “long and hard” before putting their names on an unobjectionable expression of liberal values, lest someone come along and wrongly judge through the lens of some ridiculous guilt-by-association standard. The writer Oliver Traldi calls this style of discourse “rhextortion“: It would be a shame if someone unfairly judged you as a result of the names on this letter rather than the content of its text itself.
Techdirt: Harper’s Gives Prestigious Platform To Famous Writers So They Can Whine About Being Silenced
By Mike Masnick
There’s a slightly bizarre Letter on Justice and Open Debate that Harper’s Magazine is publishing, signed by a long list of famous people . . . The framing of the letter is one I’ve heard quite a lot of late: concerns that there is some sort of “illiberal attack on free speech,” in which certain individuals and their ideas are no longer even allowed. It’s the more intellectual argument against so-called “cancel culture.” And, yes, there are examples of people being shut down for expressing their ideas, but it is much less common than people would have you believe. In many cases, what people are complaining about is not that their speech is being shut down, but that they are facing consequences for their speech being ridiculous…
[P]eople saying your ideas are bad and venerable institutions shouldn’t amplify them is not an attack on free speech or open inquiry. It’s a recognition that not all ideas are equal, and not all ideas deserve the kind of escalation and promotion that some speakers wish they had…
[A]lmost nothing described in the letter is an actual attack on free speech.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.
First off, hogwash. There are more places and ways to speak your mind than ever before, and the free exchange of information and ideas is more available and accessible to all sorts of voices than ever before in history. The idea that it’s “more constricted” has no basis in reality. There are so many different ways to get ideas out there today, and that has actually enabled tons of previously suppressed voices to speak out loudly and clearly — even if sometimes it’s to point out that the supposed wisdom of others is anything but. There is no real evidence of any “constriction.” There is evidence that many people are utilizing their newfound voices and ability to express themselves to show that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to some of the ideas presented by the old guard.
Online Speech Platforms
New York Times: Does Zuckerberg Understand How the Right to Free Speech Works?
By Greg Bensinger
Far too often [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg has chosen to allow posts spewing bigotry and lies to remain on Facebook in the name of free speech. Now, a thorough and damning audit of the company, two-years in the making and solicited by Facebook, confirms those fears…
Particularly galling, [the report found ] is Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on so-called political speech, which is allowed to remain on the site even when it is demonstrably false, misleading or sometimes dangerous. Mr. Trump’s warning to protesters in May that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” can only be interpreted as a threat…
Mr. Zuckerberg is not enabling free speech, he’s just privileging some of it. “When it means that powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less powerful voices,” the report found…
The report also raises concerns about the possibility that the social media site itself is becoming a sort of radicalization engine…
Mr. Zuckerberg is either ignoring how the right to free speech works, or he fundamentally misunderstands it. It’s time for him to listen to First Amendment experts: They would tell him that, as a private corporation, Facebook can remove or tag any post it likes.
Wall Street Journal: Why Some Hate Speech Continues to Elude Facebook’s AI Machinery
By David Uberti
An audit commissioned by Facebook Inc. urged it to improve artificial intelligence-based tools it uses to help identify problematic content such as hate speech, showcasing the current limits of technology in policing the world’s largest social media platform.
The report, made public Wednesday, examined Facebook’s approach to civil rights and criticized it as “too reactive and piecemeal,” despite much-publicized investments in AI-based censors and human analysts trained to track down and remove harmful content.
Facebook says that as of March those tools helped zap 89% of hate speech removed from the platform before users reported it, up from about 65% a year earlier, according to the report. But outside researchers argue it is still impossible to gauge just how many posts escape the dragnets on a platform so large…
Training machine-learning tools to review content as human moderators would takes time, expertise and reams of data to identify new words and imagery…
Facebook’s Dangerous Organizations team, which focuses on terrorists and other organized hate groups, illustrates the hybrid approach the company has taken…
But it has proven more difficult to reorient those tools toward white supremacists, counterterrorism experts say, which tend to be more fragmented and whose irony-laced content often overlaps with right-wing political speech. Western governments also don’t identify many of these groups as terrorist organizations, removing a key cue for tech companies to take action.
Politico: Facebook boots Roger Stone from Instagram in crackdown on ‘inauthentic’ activity
By Kyle Cheney and Steven Overly
President Donald Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone was booted from Instagram on Wednesday after Facebook determined he participated in an effort to spread “inauthentic” information – in some cases about his own criminal trial.
Stone, who is slated to go to prison next week, had been posting daily updates on Instagram about his efforts to stay out of jail and obtain a pardon from Trump. But late Wednesday, after Facebook’s announcement, his account was no longer available.
Facebook said Stone was tied to a network of deceptive accounts that posted about Florida and Stone himself, but did not provide further details on the posts’ content.
“The people behind this activity used fake accounts – some of which had already been detected and disabled by our automated systems – to pose as residents of Florida, post and comment on their own content to make it appear more popular than it is, evade enforcement, and manage Pages,” Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in the company’s announcement of the move.
“Several of these Pages had links to Proud Boys, a hate group we banned in 2018. Some Pages appeared to have acquired followers from Pakistan and Egypt to make themselves seem more popular than they were.”
Reuters: Facebook suspends disinformation network tied to staff of Brazil’s Bolsonaro
By Jack Stubbs and Joseph Menn
Facebook Inc. on Wednesday suspended a network of social media accounts it said were used to spread divisive political messages online by employees of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and two of his sons.
The company said that despite efforts to disguise who was behind the activity, it had found links to the staff of two Brazilian lawmakers, as well as the president and his sons, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro and Senator Flavio Bolsonaro.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the accounts were removed for using fake personas and other types of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” which violated the company’s rules.
The States
Arizona Mirror: Secretary of state: Goldwater Institute attorneys should have registered as lobbyists
By Jeremy Duda
The Secretary of State’s Office found reasonable cause that the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix libertarian think tank and litigation center, violated a law requiring lobbyists to register with the state.
Jeff Kros, an attorney at [the lobbying firm] HighGround, filed a complaint with the secretary of state in February arguing that two Goldwater Institute employees, Jonathan Riches and Christina Sandefur, should have to register as authorized lobbyists because they testified in legislative committees in favor of a bill that would have barred cities from imposing additional fees on ride-hailing services that operate at airports. HighGround represents the City of Phoenix and the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, both of which opposed the bill…
And [state elections director Sambo] Dul rejected the Goldwater Institute’s argument that requiring it to register employees who testify in legislative committees as lobbyists would infringe on its First Amendment freedom of expression or its right to participate in government…
“All we think is everybody should follow the same rules,” [Kros] said, echoing a complaint that some lobbyists at the Capitol have voiced about the Goldwater Institute for years.
Jackson Hole News & Guide: ACLU: Jackson man’s comment should be considered free speech
By Emily Mieure
When Kevin Hernandez denigrated the president in the direction of a man wearing a pro-Trump hat, he was met with a fist to his face and a criminal citation for picking a fight…
“[Defendant] said a slur directed at [suspect] to elicit response,” the Jackson Police Department officer wrote on Hernandez’s citation for criminal provocation, a town ordinance…
The ACLU of Wyoming says political speech is protected under law.
“The ability to express your opinion about political issues is one of the most fundamental guarantees of the First Amendment,” said Andrew Malone, staff attorney for the ACLU of Wyoming. “And the Supreme Court has recognized that one of the key functions of free speech is to spark public debate by inviting dispute. They’ve also acknowledged that this dispute may make some people very angry, but that is not a good enough reason to prohibit it.” …
“While there are some situations where speech can lose its protection if it qualifies as fighting words, that exception only applies to direct personal insults that are inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction,” Malone said. “The exception does not allow the government to punish someone for expressing their political views even if they do so in a vulgar fashion. So, except in very narrow circumstances, the government is not allowed to punish people because their speech may cause other people to react violently. And just because someone says something vulgar or offensive – especially when they’re speaking on an issue like politics – should not mean that they lose their First Amendment protection.”
