Tag: threatening

  • Quebec is threatening to outlaw public prayer

    Quebec is threatening to outlaw public prayer

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter. 

    Quebec secularism minister may ‘strengthen secularism’ by banning public prayer

    There doesn’t need to be a tension between secularism, free expression, and freedom of religion. Governments should ensure people are neither forced to adopt, nor abandon, religious views at the whims of the state. But Quebec is pursuing a different route, with the province’s Secularism Minister’s repeat public promises to ban public prayer. 

    The details of Jean-François Roberge’s planned legislation are not yet available but he has cited his “mandate to strengthen secularism” as a reason he’ll be introducing a bill to ban prayer in public places this fall. Roberge’s commitment follows earlier comments from Premier François Legault that “[w]hen we want to pray, we go to a church, we go to a mosque, but not in public places.” Legault also specifically mentioned Islamic prayer as a target. 

    Alarming new legislation in Canada, worsening repression in Hong Kong, and online global takedowns emerging from India

    Alarming new legislation in Canada, worsening repression in Hong Kong, and online global takedowns emerging from India.


    Read More

    Enforcing neutral limits on public activity to ensure traffic isn’t disrupted, for example, would be one thing. But public comments by Quebec officials thus far have suggested this effort to enforce secularism in public spaces will be much broader and limit what religious expression can be conveyed outside the confines of houses of worship. 

    There’s other free speech news out of Canada, too. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports that on the other side of the country, the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal issued a troubling $72,000 fine against X because it geo-blocked, rather than globally blocked, non-consensual intimate images the tribunal ordered to be taken down. As Masnick points out, it’s part of a growing broader challenge on the global internet where courts and officials are ordering extra-terroritorial takedowns — can one country censor the internet for everyone? As FIRE wrote about last year, Australia’s eSafety commissioner made a similar attempt to globally remove a video on X of a man stabbing a bishop.

    And Kneecap, the Irish rap trio that’s faced controversy and even police investigation in the UK for band members’ speech about Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah, has been banned from entering Canada. Parliamentary Secretary for Combating Crime Vince Gasparro cited their “hate speech” and “glorification of terrorism” that “are contrary to Canadian values and laws” as the reason.

    Latest from the UK: Graham Linehan, Palestine Action, and Epstein projection arrests during Trump’s visit

    • It seems the UK’s free speech woes are making headlines every week, but that was especially true with the arrest of Graham Linehan, who was detained by five officers when he arrived in Heathrow Airport from Arizona earlier this month. Linehan was arrested for a series of posts on X, including one where he said if “a trans-identified male is in a female only space…call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” As my colleague Jacob Mchangama explained about the arrest, “a provocative tweet from more than four months ago suggesting that someone ‘punch’ others in a hypothetical situation does not meet any meaningful threshold of incitement (imminent or not).”
    • Public attention on the UK’s average of 30 arrests a day for online expression may be hitting its mark. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in comments in the Commons that “there is a line between content that is offensive, rude, ill-mannered, and incitement to violence, incitement to hatred.” She added that “it is important that we police that line between these types of comments effectively, so that everybody in this country can have confidence in our policing system, but also confidence in exercising their rights under the law of our land.” Her words follow remarks from Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who said “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position.”
    • The mass arrests of protesters who “express support” — to be clear, just through words — for banned group Palestine Action continue full steam ahead. In one weekend this month, police arrested over 400 protesters, some of whom were taken in just for holding signs reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Protest organizers were also charged.
    • President Trump, fresh off threatening to set the U.S. Department of Justice on people who engage in so-called “hate speech” against him, was at the center of some speech controversies during his visit to the UK last week. First, four activists were arrested after projecting, without permission, images of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein onto Windsor Castle. The statute under which they were arrested should certainly raise eyebrows. They were taken in for suspicion of “malicious communications,” which targets “indecent or grossly offensive” messages intended to “cause distress or anxiety to the recipient.” Similarly, activists cried foul when police stopped them from driving an advertising van featuring images of Trump and Epstein through Windsor, where the president was staying. 

    Blasphemy news: Nigerian mob executes alleged offender, and Moroccan feminist found guilty

    As I write about regularly at the Free Speech Dispatch, blasphemy is not only still a criminal act in dozens of countries, but an offense for which the allegation alone can sometimes result in a public killing — no judge, no jury, just executioners. So was the case in Nigeria weeks ago when a mob executed a woman by burning her to death after she was accused of blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. The victim, a food vendor, was accused of making a blasphemous remark after “a man jokingly proposed marriage” to her.

    And Moroccan feminist Ibtissam Lachgar, whose arrest I discussed in the last Dispatch, was found guilty and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, along with a $5,000 fine, for blasphemy after posting a photo of herself wearing a shirt with the message, “Allah is Lesbian.”

    Chinese mining company weaponizes cybercrime law against Sierra Leone journalist 

    Chinese-owned mining company Leone Rock Metal Group filed a complaint with Sierra Leone’s Criminal Investigation Department against editor Thomas Dixon after he published an investigation alleging labor violations at the company. Dixon was detained and interrogated for hours on charges of “cyberbullying and stalking.” He also says the company “offered to drop its complaint if he agreed never to report on the company again—a condition he flatly rejected.” Another journalist was detained on similar charges just after Dixon was released on bail.

    China’s censorship goes global — from secret police stations to video games

    2025 is off to a repressive start, from secret police stations in New York to persecution in Russia, Kenya, and more.


    Read More

    Rapid free speech developments all across Asia

    • Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, who is and also coordinating minister for National Security, and Manpower Minister Tan See Leng are suing Online Citizen editor Terry Xu — and attempting to get a court in Taiwan, where Xu lives, to intervene. They’re suing over Xu’s reporting on Singapore’s luxury property market.
    • India’s Supreme Court ordered content creators to apologize for mocking disabilities in their online content. “Influencers commercialise speech. When a speech falls in the ambit of commercial or prohibitive categories, the immunity under right to free speech is not available,” the justices said.
    • Cambodia’s National Assembly unanimously passed legislation allowing those who “collude” with foreign forces or are involved in “destruction of sovereignty, territorial integrity and national security” to be stripped of citizenship. Rights groups said it “will have a disastrously chilling effect on the freedom of speech of all Cambodian citizens.”
    • American comedian Sammy Obeid is alleging that shows he planned to hold in Singapore were canceled because the Infocomm Media Development Authority wouldn’t issue him the permits over the content of his comedy. IMDA said it wouldn’t issue the permits because Obeid submitted them too late — but Obeid claims the delays were ultimately because of issues with his script discussing Israel in the show. And under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, Obeid has also been ordered to carry corrections to social media posts accusing Singapore of censorship over the incident.
    • The Chinese government has had a busy month of international art censorship. Weeks after successfully pressuring a Thai art gallery to censor an exhibit criticizing authoritarian governments, Chinese officials also pushed back against a Taiwanese art exhibit at the Republic of Kazakhstan’s Central State Museum. The day before the show was set to open “the museum abruptly announced that it would begin a one-month renovation.”
    • Bihar police arrested a 20-year-old man for using “abusive language” against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a political rally.
    • Hong Kong’s schools must now review details of activities held by all outside organizations and individuals, as well as the backgrounds of the organizers and guests, to ensure they “do not involve contents that endanger national security, nor promote political propaganda and improper values.” 

    Hong Kong, free speech, and what musing about sci-fi can teach us

    • Indonesian officers have arrested thousands of protesters in recent weeks who demonstrated against President Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo’s policies. The protests broadened “when an armored police vehicle hit and killed a rideshare driver.”
    • Nepal is still reeling after mass protests in response to government corruption and unpopular policies, including a short-lived ban on social media platforms. Dozens were killed in the protests and the Prime Minister has since resigned and not been seen publicly.
    • The full and total silencing of women under the Taliban continues. Now, books written by women are banned from Afghanistan’s higher education system.
    • Punishment under Thailand’s ban on criticism or mockery of the royal family,  lese-majeste, continues to crush political dissent in the country. People’s Party MP Chonthicha Jangrew was sentenced to two years and eight months for Facebook posts that “insulted the monarchy, incited social conflict and threatened national security.” Influencer Aniwat Prathumthin was given a suspended sentence for years old Facebook posts and, as part of her sentence, must complete community service on royal holidays. But there was some positive news: Anchan Preelert, a Thai woman who was sentenced to a shocking 43 years for lese-majeste in 2021, was pardoned and freed last month.

    Powerful Israeli minister to cut funding for awards event over winning film’s content

    Miki Zohar, Israel’s culture and sports minister, has promised to revoke funding for the Ophir Awards after “The Sea,” an “Arabic-language drama about a Palestinian boy from the West Bank who risks his life to go to the beach in Tel Aviv,” won the top prize. Zohar says the Ophir ceremony, for which film awards are voted on by the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, “spit in the face of Israeli citizens” and that “The Sea” portrays Israeli soldiers “in a defamatory and false way.”

    It’s been a bad month for free speech, basically everywhere. But there is good news.

    Egyptian-British writer and human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in prison in Egypt since 2019 for “spreading false news and harming Egypt’s national interest” after sharing a social media post about a prisoner’s death. But after years of campaigning from activists and his family — including his mother, who has undergone multiple hunger strikes — Abd el-Fattah will be freed after a pardon from Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. 

    Source link

  • Supreme Court rejects case over ‘Two genders’ shirt ban, threatening student speech across New England

    Supreme Court rejects case over ‘Two genders’ shirt ban, threatening student speech across New England

    The Supreme Court just declined to review a case that threatens freedom of speech for over a million students across New England. In thousands of public schools, administrators now have power to silence student speech they dislike.

    Last year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals significantly weakened student speech rights in L.M. v. Town of Middleborough. The case involved a Massachusetts middle schooler named Liam Morrison who was banned from class for wearing a shirt that read, “There are only two genders.” When he taped “CENSORED” over the original message, the school banned that, too.

    Morrison’s school encourages students to express the view that there are many genders, but when he offered a contrary view — the school silenced him. However, if schools want to teach gender identity to seventh graders, the law says they must tolerate dissenting views on the issue. As the Supreme Court famously held in Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, “above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”

    The prohibition on viewpoint-based censorship is a cornerstone of our First Amendment. Without it, the concept of free speech loses much of its meaning. Yet when Morrison and his parents, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, brought suit against the school and the town of Middleborough for violating his freedom of speech, the First Circuit disregarded settled First Amendment law to uphold the school’s censorship. Specifically, the First Circuit misapplied the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 student speech case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., which established the baseline rule that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

    According to Tinker, schools cannot censor student speech absent evidence that doing so is “necessary” to avoid “material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline” or “invasion of the rights of others.” A few years ago, the Court reaffirmed the Tinker standard and emphasized that it’s a “demanding” one.

    But the First Circuit’s recent decision lowers that bar, replacing Tinker’s “substantial interference” test with a far more permissive one. Now, in thousands of public schools across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Puerto Rico, student speech that is “reasonably interpreted” to “demean personal characteristics” and thus “reasonably forecasted to poison the educational atmosphere” can be censored even if it doesn’t target any particular student. 

    That isn’t just a bad ruling. It’s a dangerous one.

    It distorts Tinker’s long-established standard and gives school administrators enormous power to silence unpopular student opinions. In doing so, it elevates disagreement to the level of “disruption” — and permits those experiencing the “discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint” to silence dissenters in ways that directly contradict Tinker.

    The Supreme Court could have reviewed the First Circuit’s problematic decision and put it to rest. Instead, it looked the other way, leaving the lower court’s decision to remain on the books.

    That is quite a blow to student speech rights. As the Supreme Court recently said in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy.” 

    Unfortunately, the First Circuit’s decision sends a very different message — and the Supreme Court has failed to set the record straight. 

    Source link

  • COLUMN: Trump is bullying, blackmailing and threatening colleges, and they are just beginning to fight back

    COLUMN: Trump is bullying, blackmailing and threatening colleges, and they are just beginning to fight back

    Patricia McGuire has always been an outspoken advocate for her students at Trinity Washington University, a small, Catholic institution that serves largely Black and Hispanic women, just a few miles from the White House. She’s also criticized what she calls “the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on freedom of speech and human rights.”

    In her 36 years as president, though, McGuire told me, she has never felt so isolated, a lonely voice challenging an agenda she believes “demands a vigorous and loud response from all of higher education. “

    It got a little bit louder this week, after Harvard University President Alan Garber refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands that it overhaul its operations, hiring and admissions. Trump is now calling on the IRS to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

    The epic and unprecedented battle with Harvard is part of Trump’s push to remake higher education and attack elite schools, beginning with his insistence that Harvard address allegations of antisemitism, stemming from campus protests related to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza following attacks by Hamas in October 2023.

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.

    Garber responded that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue” — words that Harvard faculty, students and others in higher education had been urging him to say for weeks. Students and faculty at Brown and Yale are asking their presidents to speak out as well.

    Many hope it is the beginning of a new resistance in higher education. “Harvard’s move gives others permission to come out on the ice a little,” McGuire said. “This is an answer to the tepid and vacillating presidents who said they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.”

    Harvard paved the way for other institutions to stand up to the administration’s demands, Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, noted in an interview with NPR this week.

    Stanford University President Jonathan Levin immediately backed Harvard, noting that “the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution.”

    Former President Barack Obama on Monday urged others to follow suit.

    A minuscule number of college leaders had spoken out before Harvard’s Garber, including Michael Gavin, president of Delta College, a community college in Michigan; Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber; Danielle Holley of Mount Holyoke; and SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. Of more than 70 prominent higher education leaders who signed a petition circulated Tuesday supporting Garber, only a handful were current college presidents, including Michael Roth of Wesleyan, Susan Poser of Hofstra, Alison Byerly of Carleton, David Fithian of Clark University, Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers University and Laura Walker of Bennington College.

    Speaking out and opposing Trump is not without consequences: The president retaliated against Harvard by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.

    Related: For our republic to survive, education leaders must remain firm in the face of authoritarianism

    Many higher ed leaders think it’s going to take a bigger, collective effort fight for everything that U.S. higher education stands for, including those with more influence than Trinity Washington, which has no federal grants and an endowment of just $30 million. It’s also filled with students working their way through school.

    About 15 percent are undocumented and live in constant fear of being deported under Trump policies, McGuire told me. “We need the elites out there because they have the clout and the financial strength the rest of us don’t have,” she said. “Trinity is not on anyone’s radar.”

    Some schools are pushing back against Trump’s immigration policies, hoping to protect their international and undocumented students. Occidental College President Tom Stritikus is among the college presidents who signed an amicus brief this month detailing concerns about the administration’s revocation of student and faculty visas and the arrest and detention of students based on campus advocacy.

    “I think the real concern is the fear and instability that our students are experiencing. It is just heartbreaking to me,” Stritikus told me. He also spoke of the need for “collective action” among colleges and the associations that support them.

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to abolish the Education Department, and more

    The fear is real: More than 210 colleges and universities have identified 1,400-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department, according to Inside Higher Ed. Stritikus said Occidental is providing resources, training sessions and guidance for student and faculty.

    Many students, he said, would like him to do more. “When I’m around students, I’m more optimistic for our future,” Stritikus said. “Our higher education system has been the envy of the world for a very long time. Clearly these threats to institutional autonomy, freedom of expression and the civil rights of our community put all that risk.”

    Back at Trinity Washington, McGuire said she will continue to make calls, talk to other college presidents and encourage them to take a stronger stand.

    “I tell them, you will never regret doing what is right, but if you allow yourself to be co-opted, you will have regret that you caved to a dictator who doesn’t care about you or your institution.”

    Contact Liz Willen at [email protected]

    This story about the future of higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’

    Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’

    President Trump posted a message on Truth Social this morning that put social media and college campuses on high alert. He wrote:

    Colleges can and should respond to unlawful conduct, but the president does not have unilateral authority to revoke federal funds, even for colleges that allow “illegal” protests. 

    If a college runs afoul of anti-discrimination laws like Title VI or Title IX, the government may ultimately deny the institution federal funding by taking it to federal court, or via notice to Congress and an administrative hearing. It is not simply a discretionary decision that the president can make.  

    President Trump also lacks the authority to expel individual students, who are entitled to due process on public college campuses and, almost universally, on private campuses as well.

    Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.

    As FIRE knows too well from our work defending student and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech. Schools will censor first and ask questions later. 

    Even the most controversial political speech is protected by the First Amendment. As the  Supreme Court reminds us, in America, we don’t use the law to punish those with whom we disagree. Instead, “[a]s a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.” 

    Misconduct or criminality — like true threats, vandalism, or discriminatory harassment, properly defined — is not protected by the First Amendment. In fact, discouraging and punishing such behavior is often vital to ensuring that others are able to peacefully make their voices heard. 

    However, students who engage in misconduct must still receive due process — whether through a campus or criminal tribunal. This requires fair, consistent application of existing law or policy, in a manner that respects students’ rights.

    President Trump needs to stand by his past promise to be a champion for free expression. That means doing so for all views — including those his administration dislikes.

     

    Source link

  • The FTC is overstepping its authority — and threatening free speech online

    The FTC is overstepping its authority — and threatening free speech online

    Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson reached out to followers on X yesterday asking for “public submissions from anyone who has been a victim of tech censorship (banning, demonetization, shadow banning, etc.), from employees of tech platforms.” His post was accompanied by a press release from the FTC and a forum for comments on their website, both making the same requests. 

    This outreach is being conducted, according to Ferguson, “to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”

    In reality, the chair is angling to label editorial decisions he doesn’t like “unfair or deceptive trade practices.” But consumer protection law is no talisman against the First Amendment, and the FTC has no power here.

    The simplified formulation of Ferguson’s argument is this: If social media platforms are not adhering to their content policies, or “consistent” (whatever that means) in their enforcement, they are engaging in “false advertising” that harms consumers.

    Calling something censorship doesn’t make it so, and framing content moderation as “unfair or deceptive trade practices” does not magically sidestep the First Amendment. 

    Now, it is true that the FTC can generally act against deceptive marketing. That’s because pure commercial speech — that is, speech which does no more than propose a commercial transaction — possesses “a lesser protection” under the First Amendment than other forms of protected speech. And commercial speech that is false or misleading receives no First Amendment protection at all. But when speech — even in a commercial context — expresses opinions about social policy, government power over that speech gives way to the First Amendment.

    Content policies and moderation decisions made by private social media platforms are inherently subjective editorial judgments. In the vast majority of cases, they convey opinions on social policy as well as what expression they find desirable in their communities. Attempts to control or punish those editorial judgments violate the First Amendment.

    The Supreme Court recently made clear that these subjective decisions enjoy broad First Amendment protection. In Moody v. NetChoice, the Court rebuffed direct attempts by Texas and Florida to regulate content moderation decisions to remediate allegedly “biased” enforcement of platform rules:

    The interest Texas asserts is in changing the balance of speech on the major platforms’ feeds, so that messages now excluded will be included. To describe that interest, the State borrows language from this Court’s First Amendment cases, maintaining that it is preventing “viewpoint discrimination.” Brief for Texas 19; see supra, at 26–27. But the Court uses that language to say what governments cannot do: They cannot prohibit private actors from expressing certain views. When Texas uses that language, it is to say what private actors cannot do: They cannot decide for themselves what views to convey. The innocent-sounding phrase does not redeem the prohibited goal. The reason Texas is regulating the content-moderation policies that the major platforms use for their feeds is to change the speech that will be displayed there. Texas does not like the way those platforms are selecting and moderating content, and wants them to create a different expressive product, communicating different values and priorities. But under the First Amendment, that is a preference Texas may not impose.

    This is no less true when the government attempts to regulate through the backdoor of “consumer protection.”

    To illustrate the problem: Imagine a claim that platforms are engaging in unfair trade practices by removing some “hate speech,” but not speech that aligns with a certain view. What constitutes “hate speech” is entirely subjective. For the FTC to assess whether a “hate speech” policy has been applied “consistently” (or at all), they would have to supplant the platform’s subjective judgment with the government’s own “official” definition of “hate speech” — which, as you can probably already guess, will likely not be the same as anyone else’s. 

    And this illustration is not the product of wild imagination. In fact, FIRE is litigating this very question before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit right now. In Volokh v. James, FIRE is challenging a New York law requiring social media platforms to develop and publish policies for responding to “hateful conduct” and to provide a mechanism for users to complain about the same. Our motion for a preliminary injunction, which the district court granted, argued that the First Amendment prohibits the government from substituting its judgments about what expression should be permitted for a platform’s own:

    Labeling speech as “hateful” requires an inherently subjective judgment, as does determining whether speech serves to “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence.” The Online Hate Speech Act’s definition is inescapably subjective—one site’s reasoned criticism is another’s “vilification”; one site’s parody is another’s “humiliation”—and New York cannot compel social media networks to adopt it. . . . The definition of “hateful,” and the understanding of what speech is “vilifying,” “humiliating,” or “incites violence,” will vary from person to person . . .

    The First Amendment empowers citizens to make these value judgments themselves, because speech that some might consider “hateful” appears in a wide variety of comedy, art, journalism, historical documentation, and commentary on matters of public concern. 

    Ferguson and the FTC’s actions are particularly egregious given the fact that it has been made perfectly — and repeatedly — clear in the past that these kinds of editorial decisions are outside of their authority.

    LAWSUIT: New York can’t target protected online speech by calling it ‘hateful conduct’

    Press Release

    Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued New York Attorney General Letitia James, challenging a new state law that forces websites and apps to address online speech that someone, somewhere finds humiliating or vilifying.


    Read More

    In 2004, the political advocacy groups MoveOn and Common Cause asked the FTC to act against Fox News’ use of the “Fair and Balanced” slogan, arguing that it was false and misleading. Then-FTC Chair Tim Muris appropriately replied, “There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.”

    In 2020, the nonprofit advocacy group Prager University argued in a lawsuit that YouTube violated its free speech rights by restricting access to some of its videos and limiting its advertising. They claimed that as a result, the platform’s statements that “everyone deserves to have a voice” and “people should be able to speak freely” constituted deceptive marketing. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected this claim, holding that the platform’s statements are “impervious to being quantifiable” and, as a result, were non-actionable.

    The bottom line is this: Calling something censorship doesn’t make it so, and framing content moderation as “unfair or deceptive trade practices” does not magically sidestep the First Amendment. And as always, beware — authority claimed while one is in power will still exist when one is not.

    Source link