First Amendment News

Eleven advertisers dropped sponsorship for Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program after she taunted the Parkland, Florida shooting survivor David Hogg for failing to get into some colleges he applied to. Hogg reacted by calling for advertisers to boycott her program. Hogg has been an outspoken critic of the National Rifle Association. Many Ingraham supporters announced their intention to boycott the advertisers in defense of her free speech rights. (CBS Los Angeles, March 30, 2018) Carmine

Besides a renewed emphasis on fact-checking stories surfacing on its News Feed and adding stricter rules for political ads, Facebook is starting to fact-check photos and videos and warning users who share fake news. (Recode, March 29, 2018, by Kurt Wagner) Facebook has begun to block millions of fake accounts each day and increased efforts to remove foreign-based pages with fake content. It piloted these efforts in the Alabama special election recently, shutting down Macedonian

Sinclair Broadcast Group recently forced its local news anchors to read the same report on the dangers of fake news generating criticism for running pro-Trump propaganda. The company often distributes “must-runs” reflecting the political stances of the conservative company owners. (The New York Times, April 2, 2018, by Jacey Fortin and Jonah Engel Bromwich) The “forced read” segment warned of one-sided news, championed fact-checking and complained of “false news” and “fake stories.” Sinclair owns 193

The Justice Department seemed to argue in a submission to a federal judge that President Donald Trump can block certain individuals from official White House Twitter accounts since the accounts are not public forums under the First Amendment. At the request of a federal judge, the department clarified its position. “…Plaintiffs’ principal First Amendment claim does not apply to the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts any more than it applies to the @realDonald Trump account. But

YouTube removed Atlanta magazine’s video of alt-right leader Richard Spencer’s “Hail Trump” speech from its platform calling it “borderline hate speech.”  The removal came after the speech was seen over 50 million times on Facebook and YouTube. After The Atlantic challenged the removal, YouTube admitted a mistake and restored the video to public searches. (The Atlantic, March 20, 2018, by Robinson Meyer) In removing the video YouTube failed to distinguish between hate speech and reporting