Will the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) finally be declared unconstitutional? After years of being panned by sex workers, civil libertarians, tech companies, U.S. lawmakers, and even law enforcement, opponents of the 2018 law face the best shot yet of seeing its demise. That shot comes in the form […]
The World Economic Forum—an annual meeting of internal business leaders, political figures, and other elites—is well underway in Davos, Switzerland. One of the topics of discussion on Monday was “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation,” presented by former CNN host Brian Stelter. Stelter and his panelists did elucidate several pressing dangers with respect to […]
Every day, people around the world post about 720,000 hours of new content on YouTube—500 hours of video every minute. That enormous volume of material poses challenges for the platform, which aspires to enforce rules against certain kinds of content, and for its users, who cannot hope to navigate the site without help from YouTube’s […]
The Pioneer Press (Josh Verges) reports: The adjunct professor accused of Islamophobia for showing artwork in class that depicted the Prophet Muhammad filed a lawsuit against Hamline University on Tuesday as Hamline’s president conceded the school mishandled the controversy. Professor Erika Lopez Prater is suing the school in Ramsey County District Court for defamation, breach […]
United Kingdom leaders are pushing forward with a massive online censorship bill that, thanks to the lobbying of a group of lawmakers over the weekend, has been made significantly harsher with threats of imprisonment for tech platform managers who run afoul of the complicated regulations. The Online Safety Bill has been under construction in the […]
From Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty’s opinion Friday in Glapion-Pressley v. City & County of Denver (D. Colo.): Plaintiff files her Motion in four civil actions that she has commenced in the federal District of Colorado: (1) Glapion v. Castro, 14-cv-01699-MEH (2) Glapion v. Jewell, 14-cv-03236-MEH (3) Glapion-Pressley v. Denver, 19-cv-02806-RM-MEH (4) Glapion-Pressley v. Denver, 21-cv-02362-RM-MEH […]
I’m delighted to pass along this item from free speech historian Jacob Mchangama, author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, head of the Justitia think tank, and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: Hamline University has received considerable backlash for not renewing the employment of a scholar […]
The Supreme Court has long recognized that “true threats” of illegal conduct are excluded from First Amendment protection. But what mental state does the government have to show to prove that something is a true threat? Is it enough to show that a reasonable person would have recognized it as threatening (a mental state generally […]
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear Gonzalez v. Google. This lawsuit seeks to strip Google of its protections from civil liability for third-party content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The plaintiff is Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter was murdered in a 2015 terrorist attack. Gonzalez argues that YouTube, a Google subsidiary, should face […]
CNN v. SEB, decided yesterday by the Michigan Court of Appeals (in an opinion by Chief Judge Elizabeth Gleicher, joined by Judges Jane Markey and Michelle Rick, stemmed from an ongoing pattern of disputes between two neighboring families about the use of a shared driveway. “Battles raged on issues ranging from installing chicken wire fences […]