Tag: freedom of expression

New York governor proposes face-mask ban to combat anti-Semitism

New York state’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed a legislative ban on face masks on the NYC subway system to combat acts of anti-Semitism, claiming criminals are concealing their identities using the face coverings.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, New York had a law banning face masks in public. However, that rule was suspended in 2020 in light of the pandemic and the city’s authorities made face coverings mandatory for all subway riders until September 2022.

Speaking to reporters during a news conference in Albany on Thursday, Hochul stated that she was in talks with lawmakers over details of a bill once again banning masks, noting that the policy has to be clearly defined to include “common-sense exemptions” for the use of face masks for health, cultural or religious purposes. 

“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Hochul said, adding that her team is “working on a solution.”

The Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, had also mentioned reviving some version of a mask ban and returning to the way things were before the pandemic, insisting that people should not be able to wear masks at protests.

Hochul explained that she was moved to propose the ban after receiving a report earlier this week about a group of people donning face masks that “took over a subway car, scaring riders and chanting things about Hitler and wiping out Jews.”

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Rutherford Institute Threatens First Amendment Lawsuit Over Censorship of Religious Content From High School Valedictorian’s Graduation Speech

The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of a Florida high school valedictorian whose graduation speech was censored by school officials to alter and remove religious content.

Lucas Hudson, a valedictorian of the Collegiate Academy at Armwood High School in Hillsborough County, Fla., was ordered by school officials to remove religious references from his graduation speech in which he thanked the people who helped shape his character, reflected on how quickly time goes by, and urged people to use whatever time they have to love others and serve the God who loves us. School officials gave Lucas an ultimatum: either remove most of his speech’s religious content or he would not be speaking at all. In coming to Lucas’ defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warn that the school’s actions violate the rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment, Florida law, and the School District’s policy, and could expose the school to a lawsuit.

“If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “While the government may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others might take offense. People are free to ignore, disagree with, or counter the religious speech of others, but the government cannot censor private religious speech.”

As valedictorian of the Class of 2024 for the Collegiate Academy at Armwood High School, Lucas Hudson was provided the opportunity to give a graduation speech in May 2024. Lucas’s planned speech thanked the people who helped shape his character, reflected on how quickly times goes by, and briefly urged people to use the short amount of time we have to love others and to serve the God who loves us and who sent his son, Jesus, to save us. However, after submitting his speech to the principal, Lucas was told that his speech would not be accepted unless he reduced and changed the religious content. Although Lucas modified his speech, the religious message was still not acceptable to school officials who told Lucas that he needed to “make appropriate adjustments” to his speech by the next day or he would not be speaking at all. Lucas then changed his speech to only include a short sentence about the privilege of knowing the God who saved him.

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TikTok Measure Passed by House Is Unconstitutional in Multiple Ways

Is TikTok’s time finally up? On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would require a change in the app’s ownership or ban it if that doesn’t happen.

Called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, it’s essentially the same divestiture-or-ban bill I wrote about in this newsletter back in March, now tucked into a larger bill (H.R. 8038, the insanely named 21st Century Peace through Strength Act) that deals with everything from fentanyl trafficking to Russian sanctions, Iranian petroleum, Hamas, and boatloads of foreign aid.

The most talked-about part of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban TikTok unless it completely breaks ties with its Chinese parent-company, ByteDance, within 270 days.

But the bill goes far beyond TikTok, and could be used to justify a ban on all sorts of popular apps tied to China, Russia, Iran, or any other country that gets deemed a foreign adversary.

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Porn industry asks Supreme Court to block Texas law requiring age verification before accessing sites

The adult entertainment industry will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a Texas law that requires porn websites to verify the age of users. The case presents the justices with a chance to opine on the legal protections afforded to pornography, particularly in the context of the internet.

The nation’s most conservative appeals court — the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — ruled on March 7 to overturn a district court injunction that blocked Texas H.B. 1181. The law requires internet companies whose content consists of more than one-third “sexual material harmful to minors” to “use reasonable age verification methods” to limit their distribution to adults, and to display a health warning before showing any such materials. Embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton began enforcing the law in February, and shortly thereafter began a $1.6 million civil action against PornHub for noncompliance. The Free Speech Coalition, an association of the adult film industry, sued to block the Texas law, claiming that it both violated the First Amendment and conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is the federal statute that protects internet platforms from liability based on third-party content that violates the law.

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Council Orders London Fish & Chip Shop Owner To Remove British Flag Mural

A fish and chip shop owner in London has been ordered by the local council to remove a mural featuring a Union Jack flag and the words “A Great British meal” from the side of his building after some locals complained it is “not appropriate for the area.”

The Daily Mail reports that the award-winning Golden Chippy in Greenwich received the removal order from the council after a “number of complaints about the mural” and the council deciding it constitutes an “unauthorised advert” in a “preservation area.”

Shop owner Chris Kanizi, who is from Cyprus, commented “It’s just something to put a smile on people’s faces. But the council said ‘this is a preservation area – you can’t have that and you’ve got to paint over it.’”

“They also said people had been complaining, but I don’t believe that. Everyone who has talked to me say they love it,” Kanizi added.

Local residents who were asked about it expressed support for the mural.

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PROTECT Act Could Require Removal of All Existing Porn Online

Is Congress really trying to outlaw all sex work? That’s what some people fear the Preventing Rampant Online Technological Exploitation and Criminal Trafficking (PROTECT) Act would mean.

The bill defines “coerced consent” to include consent obtained by leveraging “economic circumstances”—which sure sounds like a good starting point for declaring all sex work “coercive” and all consent to it invalid. (Under that definition, in fact, most jobs could be considered nonconsensual.)

Looking at the bill as a whole, I don’t think this is its intent, nor is it likely be enforced that way. It’s mainly about targeting tech platforms and people who post porn online that they don’t have a right to post.

But should the PROTECT Act become law, its definition of consent could be used in other measures that do seek to target sex work broadly. And even without banning sex work, it could still wreak major havoc on sex workers, tech companies, and free speech and internet freedom more widely.

There are myriad ways it would do this. Let’s start by looking at how it could make all existing online porn against the law.

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Texas school suspends Black student more than two weeks for purportedly lengthy dreadlocks

Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas punished a Black student named Darryl George with more than two weeks of in-school suspension — for having dreadlocks.

“School officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violated the district’s dress code,” reported Cheyanne Mumphrey and Juan Lozano for the Associated Press. “George, 17, has been suspended since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. He was in tears when he was suspended Monday despite his family’s arguments that his hair does not violate the dress code, his mother Darresha George said.”

“He has to sit on a stool for eight hours in a cubicle,” the mother told the AP. “That’s very uncomfortable. Every day he’d come home, he’d say his back hurts because he has to sit on a stool.” She added that her son has grown dreadlocks for over 10 years and the family has never been harassed or received complaints about it until now.

This incident comes just as Texas enacted its own state version of the CROWN Act, a law that prohibits discrimination based on various racially-associated hairstyles like dreadlocks, braids, or Afros. The Georges pointed out the new law to school officials, but the principal and vice principal reportedly said that the law does not protect the length of hair.

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FSC Secures Preliminary Injunction Against Unconstitutional Texas Law

Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs, a coalition of major adult platforms and creators, have been granted a preliminary injunction against the Texas antiporn law, HB1181. Texas is blocked from enforcing the law while the case is litigated.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

The Court agreed with FSC and our co-plaintiffs on nearly every argument:

  • The law violates First Amendment rights of creators and consumers
  • The law has a chilling effect on legally-protected speech
  • Parental filters are a less restrictive and more effective method of protecting minors
  • The state does not have the right to compel speech in the form of health warnings

HB 1181 required sites with adult content to force their visitors to provide digital IDs or other official proof of age, as well as display pseudoscientific “health” warnings. Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs argued that the requirements are unconstitutional and expose consumers to significant privacy risks.

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Talking About Sex Online Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Kayden Kross, an adult film entrepreneur and a former business partner of mine, sent me a text message a few months ago. She was excited—she was seeing a community of straight dudes gather on Deeper, the power exchange and BDSM-themed website she owns, to discuss their sexual preferences, turn-ons, and other various tastes. And she was seeing this across other platforms too. This felt rare to her, and groundbreaking to me. 

When I asked Lucie Fielding, a mental health counselor in Washington state, how many spaces she was aware of for straight men to have these conversations, she said “Oh, not many—unless we’re talking incels—there’s got to be stuff on Reddit, but apart from that, these are such important forums. Because there’s such a societal pressure for men not to be talking with one another about these things.” But on platforms like Deeper, PornHub, and other online providers of adult videos, the comments section is just that sort of conversation.

Kross described the communities as having creeds of acceptance, giving examples such as “The ‘don’t yuck my yum’ thing. It’s agreed upon that so long as you are not saying something that is a political minefield, it is not OK to dog on someone else’s expression of what they’re there for. And when people do, even if it’s something where you can’t imagine anyone would be into that, you’ll see people rush to that person’s defense. There’s very much this understanding that in order for this to work, everyone has to agree not to add shame to the pile.”

And it isn’t just sexuality being shared. Someone might say, according to Kross, “‘My dog died today.’ And then someone else will chime in with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ And then the person will say, ‘I had no one,’ and ‘I’m alone.’ And then someone else would be like, ‘Well, I would have given you a hug if I was there.’ We all know, there’s this kind of idea of traditional masculinity, and the expectations are that men don’t really talk about their feelings. And the fact is, in the comment section, when you’re anonymous, you’re not subject any longer to expectations, right? That’s why we have trolls. But it’s also why you end up with these kinds of conversations that, you know—otherwise, who would you have them with?”

But these conversations, like so many others, are at risk of being censored out of existence. New state laws requiring verification of consumers’ ages threaten to wipe out small producers and scare off subscribers concerned about threats to their own reputations in the event of a data breach. Laws like SESTA/FOSTA have made promotion of adult entertainment—already an uphill battle—even more starkly difficult, reaching as far as those Reddit communities Fielding mentioned and causing many subreddits about sexuality to shutter. And payment processors and banks have been denying adult workers access to financial infrastructure for decades.

Why does freedom of speech and freedom from shame matter in this context? According to Fielding, “Shame tells us that we are bad. That our desires are bad, that our pleasure isn’t valid. And the relationship between shame and isolation is that when we feel that we are bad or that there’s something to be ashamed of, we withdraw because we don’t want to share that.… That leads to social withdrawal.… It means that folks are trying things in very risky ways, because they don’t have the community around them.” One example is choking—without proper safety and risk-informed consent, this risky activity can turn deadly with alarming ease.

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Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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