Law professor Alan Rozenshtein says that Twitter should follow the model of Mastodon to achieve a workable moderation protocol. Mastodon works like e-mail. Using the ActivityPub protocol, their users can choose to interact with users “on other Mastodon instances. And while a Mastodon instance can choose not to communicate with some other instance…, there is no central authority that can block a Mastodon user or instance from the network entirely. At the same time, no

The 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission to stop investigating two judicial candidates for stating their Republican connections and their support from anti-abortion groups during their campaigns. The court said the investigation would chill the candidates’ First Amendment rights. (ABA Journal, October 31, 2022, by Debra Cassens Weiss) Two citizens had complained that the candidates had taken positions on issues likely to come before the court. The court said

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David Cohen revived a count against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against Giuliani and associates including Fox News. The count alleged that Giuliani defamed Smartmatic with the claim that the company’s “election technology was designed and used to fix, rig and steal elections.” (Law & Crime, November 9, 2022, by Adam Klasfeld) In a related lawsuit, a judge ruled that Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against One America

Rupert Murdock publications jumped on former President Donald Trump in laying blame for the tepid Republican performance in the midterm elections. In a New York Post opinion piece conservative John Podhoretz called Trump “the most profound vote repellent in modern American history.” The Murdocks , Rupert and his son Lachlan, may have lost some trust in Trump partly over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. (The New York Times, November 10,