First Amendment News

Writing in The Verge, September 9, 2020, Casey Newton says that President Donald Trump’s dislike of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act may lead to greater censorship if they make platform companies legally liable for user posts. Newton argues that a new report offers a better solution. A Rutgers law professor suggests that more could be required for companies in exchange for Section 230 protection. A United Kingdom proposal would “’require platform companies to

A Homeland Security official filed a whistleblower complaint to protest orders to downplay white supremacist threats and Russian interference in the presidential election. Brian Murphy, who was head of the intelligence branch of Homeland Security, was demoted in August, he said, for expressing concerns and cooperating with the department’s inspector general. (The New York Times, September 9, 2020, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Nicholas Fandos) Murphy’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, released a statement that accompanied the complaint:

University administrations are citing privacy concerns in blocking attempts to cite numbers of Covid-19 infections on campus. Their efforts rest on two federal laws: FERPA, protecting the privacy of students’ educational records, and HIPAA, a health privacy rule. But experts say that the universities could publish numbers of cases school-wide without comprising the privacy of individuals. (The Washington Post, September 2, 2020, by Meryl Kornfield) The U.S. Department of Education guidelines for FERPA published in

Twitter and Facebook announced that Russians are interfering with the 2020 presidential election by setting up a network of fake accounts and a website looking like a left-leaning news outlet. The two companies are under pressure to confront the problem after failing to act in a timely fashion in 2016. (The New York Times, September 1, 2020, by Sheera Frenkel and Julian E. Barnes) In an attempt to preempt false information affecting the election, Facebook

The California legislature threw the state’s newspapers a bone as it delayed for a year the new labor law requiring them to convert contract carriers to employees. Legislators were concerned that if the law were implemented immediately, it would be a death knell for the state’s ethnic media. (Courthouse News Service, August 31, 2020, by Nick Cahill and Martin Macias Jr.) For earlier FAC coverage, click here and here.