First Amendment News

Soon after a Republican congressman posted a false image of former President Barack Obama meeting with the Iranian president, the House Ethics Committee sent a memo warning that members could be in violation of the Code of Official Conduct when posting deep fakes or other distortions that could mislead the public. (The Hill, January 29, 2020, by Emily Birnbaum) The memo stopped short of prescribing penalties and allowed that satire and parody deepfakes would still

Gideo Lewis-Kraus, Wired, January 15, 2020, warns that to blame social media for the end of evidence-based political discourse is unproductive since users drive the phenomenon. It isn’t touching the problem to ban false information and to blame the suppliers for the misdeeds of the users. “…our burden has little to do with limiting or moderating the supply of political messages or convincing those with false beliefs to replace them with true ones,” writes Lewis-Kraus,

A federal appeals court ruled that a RuneScape game developer did not violate the free speech rights of Amro Elansari in limiting players who violate the game’s Terms and Conditions from chatting freely in RuneScape or from posting to Jajex-hosted forums. (TheGamer, January 27, 2020, by Nathan Marder) The federal district court made it clear earlier that Elansari’s constitutional claims were empty. “The First Amendment and its constitutional free speech guarantees restrict government actors,” wrote

The United States dropped from 71 to 69 on the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index with zero very corrupt and 100 not corrupt. The survey measures public perceptions of corruption. Weak U.S. laws have enabled foreign despots, terror networks, drug cartels and human traffickers. “Fortunately, bipartisan legislation currently before Congress, the ILLICIT CASH Act and the Corporate Transparency Act, would go a long way toward stopping these interests from using the U.S. as a laundromat for

The Trump administration’s adversarial treatment of the news media continued in the aftermath of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dust up with an NPR reporter. The State Department eliminated another NPR reporter, Michele Keleman, from its press pool for an upcoming trip to Ukraine. (Politico, January 28, 2020, by Matthew Choi) Pompeo’s troubles with NPR began with his tirade directed at NPR host Mary Louise Kelly after an interview in which she asked Pompeo about