Tag: 1st amendment

Gavin Newsom Just Signed an AI-Deepfake Ban That Could Impact Free Speech. This Is the First Lawsuit Against It.

We were waiting for California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign on the dotted line of a new controversial bill that limits speech around AI “deepfake” content that many believe could impact memes. Now that Newsom has signed the bill, the first of several lawsuits against the censorial bills can be filed.

Christopher Kohls, an online content creator known for his political satire, has filed a lawsuit against the state, challenging recent legislation aimed at regulating AI-generated content. The lawsuit seeks to strike down two California laws which Kohls claims infringe upon First Amendment rights.

Read the lawsuit here.

The controversy began when Kohls posted a satirical video parodying Vice President Kamala Harris, which quickly caught the attention of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Following the video’s viral spread, largely due to a share by Elon Musk, Governor Newsom criticized the content, leading to the swift passage of AB 2655, the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024,” and AB 2839, related to “Elections: deceptive media in advertisements.”

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Crazy Nutcase Tim Walz Wants to Ban Free Speech in America if Kamala Wins – Elon Musk Weighs In

Democrats want you silenced!

On Monday twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton joined MSNBC’s chief conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow to discuss the 2024 election.

Hillary Clinton immediately launched an attack on President Trump and said he is a danger our country and world just one day after a second assassination attempt against him.

“The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is,” Hillary Clinton said.

Hillary Clinton then suggested that those who spread misinformation should be charged with a crime!

Hillary Clinton then suggested jailing Americans for posting “misinformation.”

Clinton was whining about so-called Russian propaganda when she launched an attack on Americans and the First Amendment.

“There were Russians engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016, but I also thing there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda and whether they should be civilly or criminally charged would be something that would be a better deterrent,” Hillary said.

Hillary is not alone.

Minnesota nutcase Tim Walz also wants to ban speech in America.

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In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

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FLASHBACK: Kamala Harris vows to use DOJ to ARREST people exercising FREE SPEECH

Daily Mail political reporter Charlie Spiering has unearthed a speech of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, vowing to have the Department of Justice(DOJ) move against “misinformation” and “hate” on social media platforms.

During a 2019 speech at the NAACP Fight for Freedom Dinner in Detroit, Michigan, Harris promised that, if given the power, she would hold social media companies responsible for spreading what she termed “misinformation” using the DOJ as a key tool.

The resurfacing of the said video on X, formerly Twitter, came amid a growing number of free speech advocates raising the alarm over what the vice president would do to censor social media platforms if she wins the election.

“We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy,” Harris said, emphasizing the DOJ’s role in enforcing accountability. “We’ll put the Department of Justice of the United States back in the business of justice. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”

She told technocrats that she would double the Civil Rights Division and direct law enforcement to address the spread of extremist ideologies and misinformation. “If you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable as a community,” Harris added.

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Free Speech and the Department of Political Justice

In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for failure to comply with the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which guaranteed the freedom of speech.

Their convictions sparked international outrage. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and then America’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg called the charges and the trial “an outrageous attempt to give the form of legality to the suppression of a basic human right.” When a secret transcript of the trial was circulated in the West, it became clear that Daniel and Sinyavsky were convicted of using words and expressing ideas contrary to what Soviet leaders wanted. They were sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, of hard labor in Soviet prison camps.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Political Justice took a page from the Soviets and charged Americans and Russians with disseminating anti-Biden administration propaganda in Russia and here in the U.S. What ever happened to the freedom of speech?

Here is the backstory.

The Framers who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both under the leadership and the pen of James Madison, were the same generation that revolted violently against King George III and Parliament and won the American Revolution. The revolution was more than just six years of war in the colonies. It was a radical change in the minds of men – elites like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, as well as farmers and laborers generally untutored in political philosophy.

Untutored they may have been, but they knew they wanted to be able to speak their minds, associate and worship as they pleased, defend themselves, and be left alone by the government. The key to all this was the freedom of speech. Speech was then, as it is today, the most essential freedom. The late Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn read and analyzed all the extant speeches, sermons, lectures, editorials and pamphlets that he could find from the revolutionary period and concluded that in 1776 only about one-third of the colonists favored a violent separation from England. By the war’s end in 1781, around two-thirds welcomed independence.

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Court Blocks Parts of California’s Social Media Law in Free Speech Clash

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted a partial preliminary injunction in the X Corp. v. Bonta case, which concerns some provisions from California’s online censorship (“moderation”) law, AB 587.

In explaining the ruling, the court said that X Corp. is “likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment.”

The law, introduced by 10 Democrats and one Republican in the state legislature and later adopted, mandates that large social media companies must report to California’s attorney-general regarding the details of their “moderation” apparatus. These companies are required to submit “Content Category Reports” twice a year.

The reports should include statements regarding whether the companies’ terms of service define hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference; if that is the case, the authorities want to know what those definitions are.

The irony of many laws dealing with the same subjects failing to properly define these categories aside, but the court of appeals judges found that this was one of the provisions that likely violated the First Amendment, therefore granting an injunction against it, and several other portions of AB 587 (under section 22677).

Another part of the law that saw the same fate relates to large social media platforms submitting a detailed description of their “moderation policies, and information about flagged content” when it comes to the same categories of speech (hate speech, racism, etc.)

The Ninth Circuit in this way reversed a previous decision by a district court not to grant a preliminary injunction – which is a temporary block until the courts decide on the merits of the case.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

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University of California Rolls Out New Free Speech Policies To Curtail Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus

The term ‘Orwellian’ is rapidly losing its gravitas with how often we make recourse to it in trying to explain global society’s piecemeal tumble into neofascism (same as the old fascism), but a recent batch of policy changes at the University of California, Los Angeles, rolling out this fall in retaliation for students and faculty’s pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests last spring, truly deserves the epithet.

Reeling in the wake of frequent anti-genocide protests, rallies, and marches last year, the occupation of Royce Quad by a pro-Palestine student encampment in April, and three major graduate student strikes since 2019 (this one, which was at UC Santa Cruz but threatened credibly to spread to UCLA, this one, and the most recent one), UCLA administration is scrambling to enact new campus-wide policies aimed at preventing student movements, activism, protests, and other forms of free expression and free association from taking place on campus, which is public land owned by the State of California.

The most desperate change takes the form of sweeping updates to the (also Orwellian-sounding) Time, Place, and Manner Policies, reported on today by the student paper, the Daily Bruin. Under the new regulations, campus administration redefines “​​publicly accessible spaces” (on a publicly-owned campus on public land with no gates or physical barriers to entry from the street) to include just two locations: a thin strip of walkway known as Bruinwalk, colloquially known by some as “the gauntlet” of leafletters, solicitors, canvassers, and undergraduate clubs seeking to boost their membership; and the area outside Murphy Hall, the main administrative building on campus. According to Daily Bruin, “Separate rules exist for events that receive administration approval 10 days in advance,” such as marches, rallies, and using a megaphone. Other heinous acts that students are no longer allowed to commit include ordering food delivery between midnight and 6a.m., walking outside during the same timeframe, and refusing to identify oneself to campus staff.

Next, a new, ironically stupid “Workplace Violence Prevention Plan” that is to be imposed on all campus employees this fall could have been in the works since before the pro-Palestine spring uprising, but the timing of its release is at best pure bureaucratic tone deafness and at worst another mechanism designed to clamp down on freedom of speech and association on campus. This is especially true because in the legal code to which it refers, ‘violence’ is defined broadly to include threats that result in ‘psychological trauma’. No matter what the boomers say, mental trauma is a genuine form of harm, so there is no issue there. The problem here, as with many of the University of California’s reactionary new policies, lies in the potential for – the likelihood of – selective enforcement. Furthermore, the concept of psychological harm was weaponized by Zionist counterprotesters last spring, led by their on-campus posterboy, who actively antagonized peaceful anti-genocide protesters and then was quoted in this Times of Israel article saying the encampment made him feel ‘not safe’.

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Bill Gates Laments First Amendment Strength on “Misinformation,” Advocates For Digital ID

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates has voiced concerns about the intersection between technology and speech, particularly criticizing the limitations he perceives the First Amendment’s free speech protections impose on combating online “misinformation.”

Gates erroneously cited the example that shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is an exception to free speech protections, a misrepresentation that has been clarified legally over time to be more nuanced in its application.

The technology magnate is grappling with what he believes to be the threats of misinformation and the technological phenomena of deepfakes.

In his discussions, particularly highlighted in an upcoming Netflix series and through dialogue with Stanford experts, Gates advocates for digital IDs to verify online identities to help curb this “misinformation.”

The Gates Foundation has donated money to digital ID projects in the past, using parts of Africa as a testing ground.

Gates’ proposed approach ostensibly aims to curb the spread of fake content and ensure that only verified individuals can publish information which means that online content can be matched to real-life identities.

However, this raises significant concerns about privacy and the potential for excessive surveillance and control over digital spaces, something Gates has never been too keen to defend.

“The US is a tough one because we have the notion of the First Amendment and what are the exceptions like yelling ‘fire’ in a theater,” Gates explained, as reported by CNET.

Gates’ commentary on the First Amendment, using the flawed “fire in a theater” analogy suggests a readiness to dilute foundational free speech principles to implement digital solutions.

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The Struggle for and Promise of Free Speech

Censorship – the regulation, suppression, and criminalization of disfavored speech – has mounted a comeback. Government officials, social media content moderators and moguls, journalists, and professors have aligned to thwart dissemination of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, hate speech, and harmful or offensive remarks. They applaud themselves as brave activists blazing a new path to the achievement of a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

Yet they are throwbacks, as Jonathan Turley shows in “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” A distinguished George Washington University Law School professor, Turley is also an eminent columnist, television analyst, and litigator. His book provides a bracing “history of the struggle for free speech in America” and an incisive account of “the promise of free speech” in the United States and wherever basic rights and fundamental freedoms are protected. Through his winning combination of historical reconstruction, legal analysis, and philosophical exposition, Turley reveals that the arguments for regulating speech that the contemporary censorship industrial complex touts as original have a long and disreputable lineage.

In the West, which developed exemplary principles of free speech, that lineage of censorship stretches back to democratic Athens, which put Socrates to death for teaching the young to ask hard questions about virtue and justice, human nature, and the cosmos. It encompasses the early modern Star Chamber which in 16th– and 17th-century England prosecuted the crime of seditious libel – speaking ill of public officials, the laws, or the government – and the great 18th century English jurist William Blackstone who insisted on seditious libel’s criminality. And despite America’s founding promise and constitutional imperatives, government silencing of criticism of government extends throughout the nation’s history. Those who today undertake to expand the authorities’ power to determine what is and what is not fit for the public to think, say, and hear give fashionable expression to the authoritarian impulses, aims, and actions that not only have beset the West, but which also have marked most political societies throughout most of history.

American constitutional government sought to break authoritarianism’s grip. The Declaration of Independence stated that government’s primary task was to secure unalienable rights, starting with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the original Constitution, the sovereign people protected speech by declining to delegate to Congress the power to regulate it. The First Amendment, ratified two years after the Constitution went into effect, explicitly denied Congress the power to abridge free speech. This reinforced the fundamental freedom – as stated in “Cato’s Letters,” widely read in 18th-century America – to “think what you would and speak what you thought.”

Free speech, Turley emphasizes, has two major justifications. The first is functional: Free speech undergirds the liberal education and robust public discussion that produce the informed citizenry on which a rights-protecting democracy depends. The second justification, grounded in natural rights teachings, affirms that speaking freely is inseparable from our humanity.

While both justifications are crucial to constitutional government in America, Turley stresses that the tendency to rely exclusively on the functional argument alone has proved calamitous. Protecting free speech solely because it is good for democracy invites the curtailment of this utterance or that publication on the grounds that it undermines democracy.

Free speech fortifies the other four First Amendment freedoms. Religious freedom includes the right to profess one’s faith, as well as the right not to profess other faiths or any faith at all. A free press keeps citizens knowledgeable about the news and circulates opinions and ideas. The freedoms of assembly and petition enable citizens to communicate among themselves and express their concerns to the government.

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NO FAKES – A Dream for Lawyers, a Nightmare for Everyone Else

Performers and ordinary humans are increasingly concerned that they may be replaced or defamed by AI-generated imitations. We’re seeing a host of bills designed to address that concern – but every one just generates new problems. Case in point: the NO FAKES Act. We flagged numerous flaws in a “discussion draft” back in April, to no avail: the final text has been released, and it’s even worse.  

Under NO FAKES, any human person has the right to sue anyone who has either made, or made available, their “digital replica.” A replica is broadly defined as “a newly-created, computer generated, electronic representation of the image, voice or visual likeness” of a person. The right applies to the person themselves; anyone who has a license to use their image, voice, or likeness; and their heirs for up to 70 years after the person dies. Because it is a federal intellectual property right, Section 230 protections – a crucial liability shield for platforms and anyone else that hosts or shares user-generated content—will not apply. And that legal risk begins the moment a person gets a notice that the content is unlawful, even if they didn’t create the replica and have no way to confirm whether or not it was authorized, or have any way to verify the claim. NO FAKES thereby creates a classic “hecklers’ veto”: anyone can use a specious accusation to get speech they don’t like taken down.  

The bill proposes a variety of exclusions for news, satire, biopics, criticism, etc. to limit the impact on free expression, but their application is uncertain at best. For example, there’s an exemption for use of a replica for a “bona fide” news broadcast, provided that the replica is “materially relevant” to the subject of the broadcast. Will citizen journalism qualify as “bona fide”? And who decides whether the replica is “materially relevant”?  

These are just some of the many open questions, all of which will lead to full employment for lawyers, but likely no one else, particularly not those whose livelihood depends on the freedom to create journalism or art about famous people. 

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