First Amendment News

A federal judge rejected Elon Musk’s attempt to invoke his free speech rights to defeat a California law requiring X, formerly Twitter, to reveal its policies and report regularly on hate speech, false information, harassment and extremism on its site. (The Hill, December 29, 2023, by Nick Robertson) Earlier this month the European Union began investigating X over its lack of transparency and failure to combat false information and hate speech while maintaining free speech

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to prevent former president Donald Trump and his attorneys from introducing arguments irrelevant or unsupported by evidence in Trump’s trial over his role in the January 6 insurrection. In his stump speeches Trump has erroneously contended many false claims including that President Joe Biden worked with the Justice Department to indict him and that law enforcement was poorly prepared and so responsible for the

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to clarify the role of government over the issue of coercing social media companies to censor content in violation of the First Amendment. EFF Director David Greene says, “Government co-option of content moderation systems is a serious threat to freedom of speech, but there are clearly times when it is permissible, appropriate, and even good public policy for government agencies and officials to inform,

Armed with artificial intelligence, anyone can create false news, resulting in a flood of content on the internet often in the guise of factual articles but spreading lies about election, war and disaster. A website called NewsGuard found over 600 AI-generated news and information sites on the internet, an increase of 1000% since last May. (The Washington Post, December 17, 2023, by Pranshu Verma) It will be some time before the public can be alerted

Jewish college students are complaining that some in pro-Palestinian protests are calling for violence against them. Administrators are under pressure to stifle these calls while reserving free expression on campus. (The New York Times, December 17, 2023, by Vimal Patel and anna Betts) Professor Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth in The New Republic, December 18, 2023, argue that university presidents should not shoulder the burden of differentiating between hate speech and free speech. They recommend