Tag: free speech

Suspended for Pro-Palestine Speech: My Statement on Yale Law School’s Embrace of AI-Generated Smears

The following statement was originally published on Helyeh Doutaghi’s account on the X platform on March 12, 2025. Last week, Doutaghi was placed on administrative leave by Yale Law School following an AI-generated article falsely accusing her of being a “terrorist” over connections to Palestine advocacy organizations.  (Reprinted from Mondoweiss.)

My name is Helyeh Doutaghi. I am a scholar of international law and geopolitical economy. My research engages with Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), postcolonial critiques of law, and the global political economy of sanctions. I have specifically examined the mechanisms and consequences of economic warfare on Iran, as well as the forms of knowledge produced in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to obscure and shield U.S. military operations from accountability. On October 1, 2023, I was appointed Deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project and joined the team. I also held the position of Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School (YLS), a non-tenured faculty role without teaching responsibilities.

On the morning of March 3rd, I was notified of an online report about me. An obscure AI-powered right-wing Zionist platform called “Jewish Onliner” published a report falsely accusing me of being a “terrorist”. Rather than defend me, the Yale Law School moved within less than 24 hours of learning about the report to place me on leave.

I was given only a few hours’ notice by the administration to attend an interrogation based on far-right AI-generated allegations against me, while enduring a flood of online harassment, death threats, and abuse by Zionist trolls, exacerbating ongoing unprecedented distress and complications both at work and at home. I endured all of this while fasting, and my request for religious accommodations during Ramadan was dismissed. Just a few hours later, YLS placed me on leave, revoked my IT access – including email – and banned me from campus. I was afforded no due process and no reasonable time to consult with my attorney.

Rather than investigate the source of these allegations first, the nation’s “top law school” accepted them at face value, and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, treating me, prima facie, as guilty until proven otherwise. Whether Yale Law School’s attorneys knowingly relied on AI-fabricated claims or simply chose willful ignorance remains unanswered.

To conduct the interrogation, Yale Law School retained David Ring from the law firm Wiggin and Dana – an attorney whose public profile includes “Israel” listed as a “service” he provides and whose portfolio boasts advising “the world’s largest aerospace and defense companies.” Twice appointed by the U.S. State Department as a Special Compliance Officer, his career is deeply embedded in the very industries that sustain genocide and war crimes in Palestine. When I raised my concerns about the potential conflict of interests posed by his participation in this process, YLS dismissed them, stating there was “no concern with his ability to conduct a fair interview.” It is reprehensible that YLS would appoint a counsel who profits from the machinery of Palestinian death to “interview” an employee about their public anti-genocide and pro-Palestine positions.

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The Speech Police

OK, this one is for all the professional “sensitivity editors” out there, and for the US Department of Homeland Security, and President Donald Trump, and the European Union censors, and all the other self-appointed Speech Police that have been goose-stepping around dictating what everyone can and can’t say and publish and think all the time like a bunch of sanctimonious little fascists.

If you’re easily offended, you’ll probably want to skip this one.

This isn’t the column I was planning to write. I was going to write an insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about “the state of the publishing industry” and “contemporary literature,” and all that crap, but then a number of recent events intervened and forced me to change my plan.

I was planning to publish that insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature, and so on, because I’ve got a couple of new books coming out soon. The first one, Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich, will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in April. The other one is a new edition of my dystopian novel, Zone 23, which will be published by Arcade Publishing in July.

Skyhorse Publishing, launched in 2006 by Tony Lyons, is one of the fastest-growing independent book publishers in the United States. The company has published 112 New York Times bestsellers. Arcade Publishing is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. Their official motto is “Something to Offend Everyone.”

As you can probably guess from the fact that they are publishing two of my books, Skyhorse Publishing and Arcade Publishing do not employ “sensitivity editors” or otherwise attempt to sanitize the writing of the authors they publish. “Sensitivity editing” is just another example of the censorship, “visibility filtering,” and other forms of speech policing that has become normalized in recent years. If you’re not familiar with “sensitivity editing,” I published a column about it in 2023 after Puffin Books—an imprint of Penguin Random House—unleashed their “sensitivity editors” on Roald Dahl’s books.

Anyway, I decided not to write that crushingly boring column about the publishing industry, the “big five” publishers that mostly decide what everyone reads, and the state of contemporary literature, and so on, because I have really had it with all the censorship, and sensitivity editing, and speech policing, and the crackdown on political dissent, and the abrogation of what remains of our democratic rights.

The Department of Homeland Security’s recent arrest and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University grad-student, who the Trump administration has accused, not of any actual crime, but, rather, of “terrorist-aligned” speech, and Trump’s fascistic tweets that followed, and people’s rationalizations of this latest example of the new, nascent form of totalitarianism I have been writing and warning about, was just … well, I felt that something a little more relevant than an insufferably pompous and mind-numbingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature was in order.

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Court blocks California law on children’s online safety

A federal judge said California cannot enforce a state law meant to shield children from online content that could harm them mentally or physically.

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled on Thursday that the trade group NetChoice deserved a preliminary injunction because it was likely to show the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act violated its members’ free speech rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

NetChoice said the law would turn its 39 members including Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Google (GOOGL.O), Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms (META.O), Netflix (NFLX.O) and Elon Musk’s X into state-deputized censors, and “censor the internet under the guise of privacy.”

The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, which defended the law, did not immediately respond on Friday to requests for comment.

Ambika Kumar, a lawyer for NetChoice, called the law “a breathtaking act of unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, content-based censorship. We are pleased to see it enjoined.”

Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2022, California’s law required businesses to create reports addressing whether their online platforms could harm children, and take steps before launch to reduce the risks.

It also required businesses to estimate ages of child users and configure privacy settings for them, or provide high settings for everyone. Civil fines could reach $2,500 per child for negligence and $7,500 per child for intentional violations.

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Georgia Antidoxing Bill Could Criminalize Everyday Criticism

Will publishing someone’s name or workplace online soon be illegal in Georgia? Last week, the state Senate overwhelmingly voted to pass an antidoxing bill that would punish a wide range of common online speech by up to a year in jail. While the bill aims to protect individuals from having sensitive information—like their Social Security numbers or addresses—published without their consent, it goes far beyond such private information.

The bill is a “law against criticism of any kind,” Andrew Fleishman, a criminal defense attorney who testified against the bill, told Reason. “It means that if I act with reckless disregard for the possibility that it might cause you mental anguish or economic harm of $500 or more, I am criminally liable, up to a year in jail. And that’s for using not just your name, not your Social Security number, not your address, but anything that could lead someone to that.”

The bill passed on March 6 in a 52–1 vote. The bill defines doxing as a crime that occurs when a “person intentionally posts another person’s personally identifying information without their consent and does so with reckless disregard for whether the information would be reasonably likely to be used by another party to cause the person whose information is posted to be placed in reasonable fear of stalking, serious bodily injury or death to oneself or a close relation, or to suffer a significant economic injury or mental anguish as a result therefrom.”

According to the bill, prohibited personal information includes anything from posting a person’s name, birthday, workplace, “religious practices of affiliation,” and “life activities” to their biometric data or a “sexually intimate or explicit visual depiction.” As a result, the bill is incredibly overbroad in terms of what speech it prohibits. 

“So if I said ‘Emma Camp is a crappy journalist,’ yes, that makes me liable under law. But if I just said ‘there’s a lady at Reason I don’t like,’ that could also do. That’s crazy,” said Fleischman. “This is a law that has a million bad applications and maybe one good one.”

Fleishman isn’t the only one concerned that the bill violates the First Amendment.

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When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins

“Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.”
~ Heather Cox Richardson, historian

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

There’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again – rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

This is how it begins.

Consider that Khalil Mahmoud, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

We are all at risk.

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Yes, The Trump Administration Has The Power To Deport Mahmoud Khalil

Federal authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Hamas coalition at Columbia University, last weekend on the charge that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and posed a threat to national security and foreign policy.

Since that time, politicians and pundits, particularly on the left, have tried to lionize this anti-West terror-supporting radical as some kind of liberal icon and have questioned whether the government has the right to deport someone of his ilk. For the record, of course it does.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) codified at 8 U.S. Code § 1182 applies to all aliens, meaning “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.” This term includes both visa holders and green card holders like Khalil. 

The INA contains a number of activities for which a person can be deemed ineligible based on security and related grounds. The relevant subsection contains nine grounds related to terrorism, the majority of which are not controversial at all: members of terrorist organizations, people engaging in terrorism, etc. 

The current debate concerns § 212(a)(3)(b)(i)(vii), which allows for the deportation of any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Some have claimed that deporting someone for these reasons violates the First Amendment. That is incorrect.

The premise of the question rests on the assumption that an alien (even a legal alien) has First Amendment rights that are exactly the same in every situation as the rights of a U.S. national or citizen. That is not the case. As the Supreme Court has made clear, sometimes the government may impose distinctions and conditions.

See, for example, Citizens United v. FEC (2010):

The Government routinely places special restrictions on the speech rights of students, prisoners, members of the Armed Forces, foreigners, and its own employees. When such restrictions are justified by a legitimate governmental interest, they do not necessarily raise constitutional problems. … [T]he constitutional rights of certain categories of speakers, in certain contexts, ‘are not automatically coextensive with the rights’ that are normally accorded to members of our society. (Emphasis added.)

The question then becomes, how might speech rights be applied differently to foreigners? For example, could such a condition involve not advocating for certain groups that the government, for good reason, considers dangerous and a threat to national security? 

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State Department To Use AI To Revoke Visas of Students Who ‘Appear Pro-Hamas’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday.

The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.”

The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”

Civil liberty groups have strongly criticized President Trump’s promises to deport foreign students who attend pro-Palestine protests since the speech of foreigners inside the US is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment.

“If we open the door to expelling foreign students who peacefully express ideas out of step with the current administration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should expect it to swing wider to encompass other viewpoints too,” Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said in an op-ed for MSNBC in January.

“Today it may be alleged ‘Hamas sympathizers’ facing threats of deportation for their political expression. Who could it be in four years? In eight?” McLaughlin added.

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Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Orders Arrest of US Citizen for Political Speech

Brazil’s pro-censorship Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has issued an arrest warrant for Flavia Cordeiro Magalhaes, a US citizen of Brazilian origin, who has lived in Florida for over 20 years.

According to her legal representative, what Moraes is attempting to do here is lock up a US citizen for political speech expressed on US soil – meaning that the warrant in effect “raises questions about US sovereignty.”

Moraes appears to have first ordered Magalhaes’ X account blocked in Brazil because of a post from 2022, which she made while in the US.

According to Magalhaes, she was unaware of the block at the time, since she was not notified by the Brazilian court. But because she continued posting on X, this eventually led to an order to place her in pre-trial detention, under the pretext that she was allegedly in contempt of court.

That is supposed to have occurred when she traveled to Brazil in December 2023 and was told her Brazilian passport was “under restriction” – but even though she entered and left the country legally, using her US passport, Moraes decided to treat this as the use of “a false document” – and issue the pre-trial detention order in February of last year.

All this, despite Brazil’s federal police documents stating that Magalhaes traveled to and from Brazil legally.

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It Didn’t Take Long for Free Speech to Prevail in Mississippi

Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.

“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”

In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.

“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”

The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.

“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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