Tag: 1st amendment

Obama Wants Filters Not Freedom

Barack Obama’s recent appearance at The Connecticut Forum once again revealed a troubling truth: the political establishment is becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of government-managed speech.

In an extended conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, the former president signaled that his tolerance for open discourse ends where his ideological preferences begin.

Amid warnings about the spread of “propaganda” and falsehoods online, Obama floated the notion of imposing “government regulatory constraints” on digital platforms.

His rationale? To counter business models that, in his opinion, elevate “the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence.”

But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see what’s really being proposed: a top-down mechanism to filter speech based on government-approved standards of truth.

This wasn’t framed as a direct assault on the First Amendment, of course. Obama was careful to qualify that such regulations would remain “consistent with the First Amendment.”

But that’s little comfort when the very premise involves the government determining which voices deserve a platform. Once the state takes a role in deciding what is true or acceptable, the line between moderation and censorship evaporates.

Obama’s remarks included a reference to a saying he alleges is attributed to Russian intelligence and later adopted by Steve Bannon: “You just have to flood the zone with so much poop…that at some point people don’t believe anything.”

This, he argued, is the tactic used by bad actors to disorient the public. What he failed to acknowledge is that the antidote to this isn’t more control, but more speech. Free people, given access to a full spectrum of views, are capable of discerning fact from fiction without government supervision.

The real danger isn’t “too much speech.” It’s the increasing desire to place speech under bureaucratic management.

Obama’s suggestion that some speech is too “hateful” or “dangerous” to be left unchecked invites a future where those in power decide what the public is allowed to hear, a vision completely incompatible with a free society.

And we’ve already seen how that plays out.

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Federal Judge Orders UO to Pay $191K to PSU Professor Blocked for “All Men Are Created Equal” Comment

The University of Oregon is facing the financial consequences of an unconstitutional attempt to suppress speech after a federal judge ordered it to pay $191,000 in legal fees to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley.

The order, issued by US District Judge John V. Acosta, follows a settlement reached in March 2025 in which the university acknowledged Gilley’s comments should not have been censored and agreed to implement major policy reforms.

The legal fees, which will be covered by UO’s insurer United Educators, include $147,070 awarded to the Institute for Free Speech (IFS) and $43,930 to the Angus Lee Law Firm.

These payments, combined with more than $533,000 that the university had already spent on its own legal representation by late 2024, push the cost of defending its actions to at least $724,000.

That figure excludes further expenses accrued since November.

These high costs are directly tied to UO’s decision to support its DEI officials after they blocked Gilley for replying “all men are created equal” to a university post on X.

This fee award reflects the substantial resources required to vindicate fundamental constitutional rights in the digital age, as well as the vigor with which the University of Oregon chose to defend unconstitutional policies,” said Del Kolde, IFS Senior Attorney.

“The university made a costly decision to prioritize DEI principles over constitutional principles, aggressively litigating this case for nearly three years rather than acknowledging the obvious, that blocking someone for quoting the Declaration of Independence violates the First Amendment.”

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X Sues New York For Demanding Social Media Data To Censor Speech

Social media company X sued New York to challenge a state law that requires social media companies to submit semi-annual reports about how they are suppressing certain kinds of speech to the New York attorney general. According to the lawsuit, provisions in the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” violate social media companies’ First Amendment rights and threaten free speech.

The law, in part, outlines “terms of service reports” in which companies must disclose to the state whether the terms of service for each of their platforms define certain “categories,” including hate speech, racism, extremism, misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. If their terms of service do include these categories, the companies would also be required to include those definitions in the report. The reports would also require companies to disclose a “detailed description” of their “content moderation practices” regarding these categories. Failing to submit the report could engender $15,000 per day. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law in December, and it is set to go into effect this year.

X challenged the constitutionality of the “Content Category Report” portions of the law, arguing that they force companies to disclose “highly sensitive and controversial speech” protected under the Constitution. X also noted that content moderation “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” and that “[t]his is not a role the government may play.”

Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” bought Twitter in 2022 to return the platform to “a digital town square” where ideas could be debated freely. He loosened the platform’s content moderation rules and readmitted suspended users, including President Donald Trump.

New York State Sen. Brad Holyman-Sigal and Assemblywoman Grace Lee, both Democrats, sponsored the law. In a letter that X quoted in the lawsuit, the two politicians said that X and Musk have a “disturbing record,” which “threatens the foundations of our democracy.” In a Tuesday statement responding to the lawsuit, the two lawmakers called social media companies, including X, “cesspools of hate speech,” and claimed the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” is necessary for “transparency.”

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Minnesota To Mandate Mental Health Warnings on Social Media; First Amendment Questions Loom

Minnesota has positioned itself at the forefront of a deeply contentious regulatory frontier by enacting the nation’s first law requiring social media platforms to display mental health trigger warning labels to all users.

Tied to the 2025 Special Session Health and Human Services bill and awaiting the governor’s signature, the law takes effect July 1, 2026, and imposes unprecedented obligations on digital platforms to act as public health messengers.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Drafted by State Representative Zack Stephenson (DFL-District 35A), the measure compels platforms to display prominent mental health warnings on login, highlighting alleged risks associated with usage, particularly among youth, and directing users to crisis services like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

These alerts must be acknowledged before access is granted, cannot be hidden in terms of service, and must not be dismissible without interaction. Content for the mandated warnings will be controlled by the Minnesota Commissioner of Health, alongside the Commissioner of Commerce.

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Southern Baptists target porn, sports betting, same-sex marriage and ‘willful childlessness’

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

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State criminalizes political memes, gets sued by popular satire site

The Babylon Bee, a popular satire website, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Hawaii challenging a state law that censors online content, “including political satire and parody.”

An announcement from the ADF, which is representing the publication as well as a Hawaii resident in the case, said, “The law violates fundamental free speech and due process rights by using vague and overbroad standards to punish people for posting certain political content online, including political memes and parodies of politicians.”

The ADF explained Gov. Josh Green signed S2687 into law in July 2024, and it bans the distribution of “materially deceptive media” that portrays politicians in a way that risks harming “the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.”

Further, the state forces satire artists to post disclaimers, destroying the purpose of satire.

“Hawaii’s war against political memes and satire is censorship, pure and simple,” said ADF lawyer Mathew Hoffmann. “Satire has served as an important vehicle to deliver truth with a smile for centuries, and this kind of speech receives the utmost protection under the Constitution. The First Amendment doesn’t allow Hawaii to choose what political speech is acceptable, and we are urging the court to cancel this unnecessary censorship.”

Seth Dillon, chief of the Bee, said, “We’re used to getting pulled over by the joke police, but comedy isn’t a crime. The First Amendment protects our right to tell jokes, whether it’s election season or not. We’ll never stop fighting to defend that freedom.”

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Ohio podcaster files to reverse conviction for felony intimidation

A true crime podcaster convicted of felony intimidation for attacking the reputations of Norwalk, Ohio, city employees in a social media post is asking an Erie County judge to reverse that decision, the law firm that filed the motion announced on Tuesday.

The Pattakos Law Firm argues that Ashli Ford’s Facebook post is free speech protected by the First Amendment and is not a threat that should warrant her conviction. The firm also claims the conviction has had a “chilling effect” that silences the “non-threatening expression” made by Ford.

According to court documents, the September 2023 Facebook post made allegations against multiple city officials in Norwalk: Mayor David Light, the city’s law director and prosecutor Stuart O’Hara, the city’s safety and service director Michael White and former Norwalk police chief David Smith.

“Ford stated she had the four men ‘on [their] knees,’ and she would ‘slowly crumble the reputation of every person who stands in the way of justice,’ according to court documents. “She went on to claim she would ‘escort [them] to [their] demise in a manner more akin to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr.'”

The Akron-area law firm claims “the Facebook post for which Ford was convicted consists entirely of classic political speech and does not contain any content that could be reasonably construed as a ‘true threat’ so as to overcome the First Amendment’s robust protections for such speech.”

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British Attacks on Free Speech Prove the Value of the First Amendment

Political activists occasionally propose a new constitutional convention, which would gather delegates from the states to craft amendments to the nation’s founding document. It’s a long and convoluted process, but the Constitution itself provides the blueprint. Article V allows such a confab if two-thirds of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures call for one.

These days, conservatives are the driving force for the idea, as they see it as a means to put further limits on the federal government. Sometimes, progressives propose such a thing. Their goals are to enshrine various social programs and social-justice concepts. Yet anyone who has watched the moronic sausage-making in Congress and state legislatures should be wary of opening Pandora’s Box.

I’d be happy enough if both political tribes tried to uphold the Constitution as it is currently drafted. It’s a brilliant document that limits the power of the government to infringe on our rights. Without the first 10—the Bill of Rights—this would be a markedly different nation.

For a sense of where we might be without it, I’d recommend looking at Great Britain and its approach to the speech concepts detailed on our First Amendment. Our nation was spawned from the British, so we share a culture and history. Yet, without a specific constitutional dictate, that nation has taken a disturbing approach that rightly offends American sensibilities.

As Tablet magazine reported, “74-year-old Scottish grandmother Rose Docherty was arrested on video by four police officers for silently holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading ‘Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.'” Thousands of Brits are detained, questioned, and prosecuted, it notes, for online posts of the type that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow here. The chilling effect is profound.

This isn’t as awful as what happens in authoritarian countries such as Russia, where the government’s critics have a habit of accidentally falling out of windows. But that’s thin gruel. Britain and the European Union are supposed to be free countries. Their speech codes are intended to battle disinformation/misinformation, but empowering the government to be the arbiter of such vague concepts only destroys everyone’s freedoms.

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ADL Regional Director Calls for Government-Regulated Online Censorship

The Anti-Defamation League’s David Goldenberg is demanding a broad overhaul of how speech is governed on the internet, calling for both government intervention and intensified corporate censorship. In a recent appearance, Goldenberg, who heads the ADL’s Midwest operations, expressed frustration over what he sees as declining efforts by tech firms to suppress online content he deems hateful.

Citing Meta’s rollback of its fact-checking team in the United States, he argued that platforms must be forced to take action. “You have a platform like Meta that just gutted its entire fact-checking department…And so what we need to do is we need to apply pressure in a real significant way on tech platforms that they have a responsibility, that they have an absolute responsibility to check and remove hateful speech that is inciteful.”

Goldenberg advocated not just for voluntary moderation, but for legislative and regulatory measures, both at the federal and state level, that would compel platforms to act as speech enforcers. He pointed to efforts in states like California as examples of where local governments are already testing such models.

His concern centers around what he perceives as an ecosystem of radicalization made easily accessible by today’s digital infrastructure. He warned that extremist ideologies no longer require obscure forums or dark web communities to spread. “It used to be you had to fight going into the deep dark web… Now… it’s easier and easier to be exposed in the mainstream,” he said.

Framing the online environment as a catalyst for violence, Goldenberg argued that free access to controversial viewpoints must be curtailed. He called for social media companies to take a stronger stance by excluding users whose views fall outside accepted boundaries, adding that regulation should enforce this responsibility.

He zeroed in on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a critical piece of legislation that shields platforms from legal liability over user-posted content. “Congress needs to amend Section 230, which provides immunity to tech platforms right now for what happens,” Goldenberg said. He dismissed comparisons between modern platforms and telecommunications companies, referencing past remarks by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg about how phone providers were not liable for threats made over calls. Goldenberg’s view was blunt: “These tech platforms are not guaranteed under the Constitution. They’re just not.”

From his perspective, private companies should be free to “kick people off, to de-platform,” and if they fail to do so voluntarily, they must be pressured or regulated into compliance. He described accountability as a mechanism for shaping behavior, stating, “Accountability is a tool that can be incredibly effective in changing behavior.”

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Rubio Announces Visa Restrictions on Foreign Nationals Involved in Censoring Americans

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on May 28 new visa restrictions against foreign nationals involved in censoring the speech of U.S. citizens.

“For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights,” Rubio announced in a post on social media platform X.

“Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life—a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”

Rubio said foreign nationals involved in suppressing the rights of Americans shouldn’t be allowed to visit the United States.

“Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over,” he said.

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