Category Archives: Freedom of Speech

PRESS STATEMENTANTONY J. BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATEAPRIL 10, 2022

The United States government is concerned about violence in El Salvador and the passage and implementation of the April 5 Criminal Code amendment by the Legislative Assembly criminalizing reporting on certain gang activities. The law lends itself to attempts to censor the media, prevent reporting on corruption and other matters of public interest, and silence critics of the Salvadoran government.

Journalists must have the freedom to do their jobs without fear of violence, threats, or unjust detention.

We continue to support El Salvador in its efforts to reduce the proliferation of gangs. Since 2008, we have invested $411 million to improve citizen security and help the Salvadoran government combat gang violence. Examples include the construction of a state-of-the-art forensics lab in Nuevo Cuscatlan, and assistance to reclaim and renovate public spaces such as Parque Cuscatlan.

We are deeply concerned by the spike in violence and homicides committed by the MS-13 and the Barrio 18 gangs in El Salvador on March 25, 26, and 27.

Gangs pose a threat to the national security of El Salvador and the United States. We urge El Salvador to address this threat while also protecting vital civil liberties, including freedom of the press, due process, and freedom of speech.

Now more than ever it is essential to extradite gang leaders to face justice in the United States.

By U.S. Embassy San Salvador | 10 April, 2022 | Topics: News

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Violence and Threats to Free Speech in El Salvador - USEmbassy.gov

Bill Maher is angry -- really, really angry -- because people seem to care more these days about hurting someone's sensibilities way more than free speech, so he has developed a lecture to drive home his point -- Explaining Jokes to Idiots!

The "Real Time" host used a blackboard and a pointer to demonstrate how free speech is not just on the chopping block -- it's already been chopped, as evidenced by the reaction and debate over Chris Rock's joke that triggered the slap.

Bill has made his position clear ... the joke at its core was about Jada Pinkett Smith looking like another beautiful woman -- Demi Moore, and NOT about alopecia. As BM put it, "It wasn't an alopecia joke any more than the chicken crossing the road is about bird flu."

He points out Will Smith's initial, genuine reaction to the joke -- laughter, but then he realized he had to "conform" to what someone else was feeling, and he did a 180 to blind rage.

Now the broader point ... "Comedians have been under attack for some time. So I must defend my tribe. This war on jokes must end."

As Bill explained to the humor-challenged community -- which is ever larger -- many jokes -- arguably the funniest -- have an offensive element. We used to laugh at that, but now the comedians who dare to tell these jokes are derailed and canceled.

He points to a Vice study that certain colleges now screen prospective comedians they might bring on campus to make sure they aren't telling offensive jokes. As Bill put it, colleges used to be a place to lose your virginity. Now it's a place to lose your sense of humor.

Bill is making a bigger point ... the walls are closing in on free speech, the essence of which requires you to allow people to make comments that you find offensive or even abhorrent.

It's sad ... we are watching Ukrainians fight and die for freedom including freedom of speech, and Americans are squandering that precious, cornerstone of democracy.

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Bill Maher Uses Will Smith Slap to Bemoan the Death of Free Speech - TMZ

Dr. Stanley Fish addressed topics such as free speech, hate speech and academic freedom on April 3 at NDSU. By examining the first amendment he shared his thoughts on how hate speech and free speech are up for interpretation. According to NDSU, Fish argues that free speech is a double-edged concept it frees us from constraints, but it also frees us to say and do terrible things.

Dr. Stanley Fish is an author and a professor. He has formerly worked and taught at the University of California, Berkeley; John Hopkins University; Duke University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He worked as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences during his time at the University of Illinois, according to NDSU. He has authored several books such as, Sinning Argument, How Milton Works and Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech: And Its a Good Thing.

Fish presented his finding of free speech at NDSU and answered audience questions. He largely talked about hate speech and its ambiguity. Hate speech can not be defined because in order to define it, you would have to be able to distinguish in a neutral and non-political way utterances that are hateful from utterances that are not hateful, he said. According to Fish, this is impossible to distinguish because no values or utterances are universal to everyone in the world.

He explains how people do not believe that certain speech is hateful because it is their perspective on the world. He stated that people view it as their truth, rather than a hateful action. He explains that people do not view some hate speech as hateful, but rather their freedom to share their own beliefs.

Fish explained that all hate speech will be political. Hate speech legislation is irremediable political. It will always be slanted and biased because of its political nature and the personal perspective on the issue.

Fish later explained his definition of hate speech by saying, Hate speech is what your enemy says loudly and effectively. He stated that people want free speech for themselves and not for the opposing group.

Fish stated how the operations of the first amendment are rhetorical. Its a collection and ensemble of Talismanic phrases and slogans, ritually invoke examples, fabricated entities like the marketplace of ideas, shaky distinctions and then ad hoc exceptions to those distinctions. This is all made up first amendment rhetoric, said Fish.

He explained that free speech justifies hate speech in many cases because of its ambiguity. Many court cases try to present free speech as a reason for their actions. The rhetoric of the first amendments helps lawyers justify their defendants actions.

Fish also explained free speech in higher education. Students have no free speech rights, it is entirely a matter of the instructors discretion, said Fish. He also stated that the instructors are also limited in their freedoms of speech. University and college teachers have the freedom only to do that job, he said.

The university is in the business of education, where the advancement of knowledge, not the advancement of free speech interests is the goal and the obligation, said Fish.

He explains that Freedom of Speech does not have a specific shape or set of rules which makes it so hard to determine. We dont know what Freedom of Speech is. Freedom of speech is, if its anything, kind of a chameleon.

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Dr. Stanley Fish discusses the first amendment - NDSU The Spectrum

Muslim worshipers gather on May 9, 2021 at Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, where tensions between Israeli police and Palestinians escalated that night into open conflict. (Mohammad Arar / Shutterstock.com)

by Greg Gonzalez

Last month, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement condemning legislative attempts to restrict instruction about Israel and about racism in the United States. While the AAUP consistently opposes legislation restricting how race and sex can be taught on college campuses, its opposition to legislation that defines antisemitism to include any criticism of Israel is a new and welcome development.

Like FIRE and other civil liberties organizations, the AAUP specifically criticizes legislative efforts to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition states:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, and the Israel-Palestine conflict have called the IHRA definition highly problematic and controversial

In 2019, Florida passed legislation that utilizes language nearly identical to the IHRA definition to address antisemitism on college campuses. Several more states, as well as Congress, considered adopting the IHRA definition which is also the definition used by the U.S. Department of State for data collection purposes to combat discrimination on college campuses. Further, then-President Trumps 2019 Executive Order 13899 directed agencies charged with enforcing Title VI to consider the IHRA definition.

As the AAUP explains, Fifty-six scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, and the Israel-Palestine conflict have called the IHRA definition highly problematic and controversial, noting that it privileges the political interests of the state of Israel and suppresses discussion and activism on behalf of Palestinian rights.

In fact, the definitions primary author, Kenneth S. Stern, has opposed legislation requiring its use because of the likelihood that it would chill campus speech.

As the AAUP further notes:

[The IHRA definition] has provided a pretext to bring coercive legal actions against supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, denying proponents of this peaceful form of economic and cultural protest their freedom of expression. And it has led to cancellation of university courses and conferences on the rights of Palestinians and to targeting faculty members in Middle East studies for dismissal and other severe sanctions.

The AAUP states that the expansive definition is an assault on academic freedom and undermin[es] the public mission of higher education to serve the common good through open, searching, and critical pedagogy; research; and extramural speech. Further, the AAUP believes that existing civil rights laws that prohibit religious or race discrimination can be used to combat the purported increase in antisemitism.

FIRE has repeatedly warned about the threat to free speech rights posed by legislative and regulatory efforts to employ the IHRA definition in identifying alleged discriminatory harassment. What constitutes a certain perception of Jews is open to many interpretations, and, thus, is hopelessly vague. Illustrating this vagueness is the list of examples of antisemitism that accompanies the IHRA definition, including [d]rawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The First Amendment clearly protects the speech in this example. After all, because a person is allowed to compare the policies of countries other than Israel to that of the Nazis, it is an impermissible viewpoint-based restriction to forbid such comparisons to contemporary policies supported by the Israeli government.

As such, the IHRA definition is too vague and overbroad to be used as a basis for antidiscrimination efforts in institutions of higher learning. Notwithstanding these criticisms, policymakers continue to push for its usage.

Just in February, members of Congress urged the Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights to prioritize a proposed rulemaking in response to Executive Order 13899 on Combating Anti-Semitism, which directs federal agencies to consider the IHRAs definition and its accompanying examples of antisemitism when regulating how schools protect Jewish students from discrimination. Of course, OCR can play an important role in helping higher education institutions adequately address discriminatory antisemitic conduct, but utilizing or adopting the IHRA definition in the rulemaking process risks chilling or punishing protected speech.

FIRE applauds the AAUPs opposition to legislation that uses the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Our concern is not hypothetical. As we recently wrote, Elected officials and private actors have indeed sought to pressure universities to suppress speech critical of Israel, or to enlist the Department of Education to do so.

Combating discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin is a laudable goal, but must be done in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and principles of academic freedom. FIRE applauds the AAUPs opposition to legislation that uses the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and we look forward to working together on this important issue in the coming months and years.

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AAUP sides with FIRE, opposes legislation which adopts overly broad antisemitism definition as threat to academic freedom and freedom of speech -...

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Last week, the Supreme Court handed down two nearly unanimous decisions in cases involving the First Amendment. One was an 8-1 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts inRamirezv. Collier, in which the Court sided with a death row inmate who claimed he had the right to have the religious leader of his choice touch him and pray audibly for him in the execution chamber. The other opinion was 9-0 inHouston Community Collegev.Wilson, where the Court held that a legislative censure issued by a community college board did not violate the free speech rights of the respondent, another trustee on the board, in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

First Amendment expertsMichael McConnellof Stanford Law School andEugene Volokhof UCLA Law join hostJeffrey Rosento discuss the opinions' impact on how we interpret and understand and religious freedom and freedom of speech in America.

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Prof. Michael McConnell, Jeff Rosen, and I on the Court's Recent Free Speech and Religious Freedom Cases - Reason

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Americas first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was also one of its shortest-lived. Motivated by the creed That Memorable Occurrents of Divine Providence may not be neglected or forgotten, the inaugural issue, published in 1690, aired rumors of an affair between the French king and his daughter-in-law, along with other scandalous reportsand was promptly censored and confiscated by British authorities in Boston. But the American appetite for such salacious fare was irrepressible. By the time of the Civil War, journals such as The Illustrated Police News were devoted to graphic depictions of real-life criminal cases: Readers were served up vivid woodcuts of brothel raids, hangings, suicides, and child deathsthe more violent and gruesome, the better.

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

The invasiveness of contemporary gossip sites, social media, and search engines, it turns out, has a long pedigree. Although the technologies of dissemination have changed, the impulse to portrayand profit fromintimate material has thrived for centuries.

The lineage of the counter-impulselegal efforts to restrain intrusions into Americans private lives and affairsis shorter and its legacy more elusive. Public calls for a right to privacy emerged only at the turn of the 20th century, triggered by a more aggressive press as well as technical innovations like instantaneous photography, new communication platforms like the telegraph and the telephone, and, later, novel uses of personal information by private companies and government agencies. In response, state legislatures, the Supreme Court, and eventually Congress stepped in to patrol the boundary between the properly public and the deservedly private.

The battles were at times spirited. But many commentators now claim that the war is over, and that privacy has lost. Public and private organizations alike mine the minutiae of our lives, and citizensenmeshed in a culture of confession and data-driven consumerismare unable, or unwilling, to resist. Older modes of discretion have given way to an ethos of self-disclosure, an urge to be known. In this view, the sidelining of privacy as a social and cultural valueas well as a legal rightwas only a matter of time.

Read: Welcome to the age of privacy nihilism

The rise of powerful technologies (facial recognition) and businesses (Facebook) that hinge on access to our personal information understandably inspires such fatalism. Yet over the past two decades, ever-expanding surveillance has been accompanied by a wide-ranging public debate about protecting aspects of our lives from scrutinyevidence that privacy, endangered though it may be, is not yet extinct as a cultural concern. Indeed, that debate has sparked a welter of new proposals for protecting private life, such as the right to be forgotten and the right to move through public spaces undetected.

In Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, the legal scholar Amy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought. She argues that although the right to privacy may have been a 19th-century innovation, privacy sensibilities have since the nations beginnings served as a durable counterweight to the hallowed principles of free speech, free expression, and the right to know. Ranging across several centuries, her account of the determined fight to protect privacy sounds like just the sort of road map we could use right now. But legal victories won in the name of privacy have often been sorely inadequate. Whats more, they have historically favored the privileged over the vulnerable. A realistic defense of privacy in the digital age isnt a lost cause, but it will require grappling with new social as well as technological challenges. It will also entail reckoning with privacys past uses and abuses.

Seek and Hide focuses on a specific kind of privacy conflict: the propriety of publicizing true but intimate or embarrassing facts about a person. That sort of shame-inducing exposure may sound almost pass in the era of Twitter and TMZ. Were by now used to personal missteps forever preserved online, innuendo circulating on the web, doxing as a weapon of rhetorical war. We take for granted the constant prying that seems to come with a life hooked up to the internet. But the history of disputes over press invasions serves as a kind of barometer, revealing the cyclical nature of privacys fortunes. It also highlights the persistent disparities in whose privacy has mattered to lawmakers and courts.

From the September 2020 issue: The AI panopticon is already here

Gajda traces the championing of privacy (and skepticism of an overly free press) back to the nations founding. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamiltonwho otherwise agreed on littleboth spoke to the damage that truthful-but-embarrassing disclosures could cause. To let such details loose in the world, Hamilton charged, was a two-edged sword, by which to wound the public character and stab the private felicity of the person. (Both men, it should be noted, were considerably less bothered when those details concerned a political rival.)

Not incidentally, these men each had a personal investment in keeping certain matters quiet: Jeffersons sexual relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings and Hamiltons affair with a married woman, made still more scandalous by his payoffs to her husband. Courts, following the lines of status in American society, were generally happy to oblige, punishing journalistic invasions chiefly when they threatened the reputations of elite white men.

The cohort of Americans who could count on their privacy being respected grew over the course of the 19th century. The middle class, with its newly genteel sensibilities and domestic sanctuaries, was now included, although womens and childrens privacy continued to matter mostly as an extension of that of male heads of household. At a time when immigrants, nonwhite people, the poor, criminals, and other unworthies were neither allotted much privacy nor thought to deserve it, the well-heeled and respectable won libel suits against reporters for printing potentially damaging stories. In the mid-19th century, for example, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that a local newspaper was unquestionably out of line in tarnishing the name of a good, pious, virtuous and honest woman by recounting that, during the course of a party she had attended, kisses were bestowed on ripe lips and cheeks generally innocent of such sweet tokens.

Long before a right to privacy was codified, American law thus drew a line between issues of public import that needed to see the light of day and intimate affairs that individuals had every right to cloak. Certain matters were considered especially intimate. Personal correspondence, sexual liaisons, indecorous divorce proceedings, medical diagnoses, and images of the naked body were all deemed worthy of protection. By the 1880s, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to recognize this boundary in a search-and-seizure case, describing the privacies of life as an essential component of liberty and a sacred right.

It was in the next decade that privacy became a major public concern. This was prompted by the growing audacity of the scandal press, but also by the impact of new technologies, such as the telegraph and the telephone (and with it, the potential for wiretapping). Instantaneous photography in particular let loose a whole new species of virtual invasion in the form of Kodak fiends, proto-paparazzi who were now able to captureand disseminateindividuals images without their knowledge or consent.

In 1890, in what went on to be hailed as a landmark Harvard Law Review essay, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, Boston lawyers, decried the press for transgressing the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency and trafficking in gossip as a trade. They also fretted over the novel forces allowing the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons. What they demanded in response was an actionable right to privacy. Their article helped give shape to a new legal claim for damages: the publication of private facts. (Ironically, Warren was heir to the paper company whose product made the printing of illustrations and photographs financially feasible for the scandal presseven as it also supplied paper to more reputable organs like The Atlantic.)

Although their call for a new right was inspired by modern privacy invasions, Brandeis and Warren traded in older gender- and class-bound ideas about who suffered most, both materially and psychologically, from the slings and arrows of publicity. Delicacy around embarrassing revelations was still often imagined as the privilege of elites. As their contemporary, the editor E. L. Godkin, put it, privacy was one thing to a man who has always lived in his own house, and another to a man who has always lived in a boardinghouse. Yet the ability to at least stake a claim against unwelcome public scrutiny was becoming available to a wider array of Americans.

One flash point was a 1900 suit filed by a 17-year-old named Abigail Roberson, charging that she was made sick by the unauthorized use of her image (shown in profile, revealing a bit of collarbone, and accompanied by the tagline Flour of the family) in advertisements for the Franklin Mills flour company25,000 posters displayed in grocery stores, saloons, and other public venues. As Gajda recounts, a lower court sided with Roberson, stating that every woman has a right to keep her face concealed from the observation of the public. A higher court pointedly disagreed, however, that anyone had a right to move through the world free of unwanted publicity. Indeed, others would have appreciated the compliment, Judge Alton Parker pronounced. Popular outcry led the New York legislature to pass the nations first privacy statute the following year. Tellingly, Parker changed his tune just a couple of years later, when he ran for president and became desperate to escape camera fiends and what he described as the sleepless surveillance of surreptitious snapshotters. His own private life and affairs, unlike a pretty young girls, seemed obviously worthy of shielding.

Read: Child data-privacy laws arent protecting kids

The Roberson case pointed to the way commercial interests and evolving cultural values would recast privacy debates in the 20th century. Even as privacy rights gained a firmer footing, the notion that one could not realistically live outside the public gaze was taking hold. It was a position that scandalmongers as well as respectable papers endorsed as part of the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom. Defined relatively narrowly in Hamilton and Jeffersons day, the peoples right to know was becoming a more expansive concept, promoted by publishers and reporters and backed by courts. The ebbing of Victorian norms of propriety, which had sought to keep unseemly matters out of public places, helped loosen rules on what was publishable, too.

The impulse to tell all was temperedfor a timeby the professionalization of journalism in the 1920s. The American Society of Newspaper Editors drafted national standards of behavior for its members, more of whom now came out of journalism schools. The dean of the University of Missouris journalism school, the first such program in the country, wrote in 1914 that no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman. (The choice of language suggests the lasting association between privacy rights and social status.) In turn, jurists began to trust reporters to make their own calls as to what was in the public interest to exposeto adjudicate what was newsworthy and what was not.

For a moment, the United States enjoyed a rare alignment of privacy sensibilities, journalistic practice, and the law. It didnt last long. As the legal historian Samantha Barbas has explained, the courts deference to the press led, by mid-century, to a transformation in the very meaning of the term newsworthy. It came to refer not to what the public needed to know but to what it wanted to know. And what the public demanded was still the stuff of The Illustrated Police News: voyeuristic accounts of sex and violence.

The courts ratified this shift. In 1966, the Supreme Court heard Time, Inc. v. Hill, which concerned Life magazines misrepresentations of a familys experience being taken hostage during an armed robbery. The Court ruled in favor of the publisher. In an echo of the Roberson case, the majority indicated that exposure of the self to others was simply part and parcel of life in a modern society that placed a primary value on freedom of speech and of press.

In subsequent decades, courts tilted further still, offering constitutional protection to parties who had exposed a private citizens sexual orientation against his wishes, published a rape victims name because it was discoverable in public documents, and televised a horrific accident scene in the name of public interest. Under American law, a private person could become a public one, his or her life stripped bare, simply by virtue of bad luck. Well before the advent of the internet age, American jurisprudence was coming around to the view that everyone was a public figure, and without the restrictions, cultural or legal, on the flow of personal information that Hamilton and Jefferson had counted on.

The vicissitudes of the right to privacy over the past two centuries suggest that we may be overdue for a reckoning akin to Brandeis and Warrens. Even in a no-holds-barred social-media landscape, we are not without resourceswhether in the form of legal precedents or changing social values.

Californias privacy regulations now permit minors to erase their past social-media posts, a version of Europes right to be forgotten. New statutes criminalize the humiliating nonconsensual sharing of explicit photos and videos known as revenge porn. Whistleblowers have begun to reveal the calculated damage to both private and public life caused by unregulated social media. Cities have banned facial-recognition technologies. Courts have ruled that Americans are entitled to some privacy in even the most public of places. Details that were never before treated as privatesuch as home addresses and geolocation datahave earned legal protections.

Pitched battles over claims of privacy and publicity underscore the urgency, and unsettled boundary lines, of our own historical moment. So far, these efforts have been scattershot. But they make clear that privacy is not over. As in the past, new privacy claims are emerging in tandem with novel violations.

Crazy/Genius: Derek Thompson on why we should care about privacy

History of course provides no tidy formula for the present. Gajdas chronicle reveals an enduring tension between principles of free speech and respect for individuals private lives. But it also throws into sharp relief how much the context for that debate has changed in the past several decades. Highly visible privacy invasions have by no means abated: Take Jeff Bezoss recent fight with the National Enquirer over its threat to print embarrassing photos of him and his girlfriend, or Hulk Hogans lawsuit against Gawker over the publishing of a sex tape featuring the former wrestler. (The success of the latter was, depending on your point of view, a victory for privacy or proof that it remains a prerogative of powerful men.) But such episodes in the tabloid press are now swamped by a much more extensive and complex ecosystem of incursions.

Our models and tools for safeguarding privacy need to catch up. We live in a world where daily, continuousand often unfelt and unseenintrusions are the rule, the work not just of traditional media but of tech companies, data-analytics firms, entertainment systems, financial industries, and state agencies seeking unfettered access to our information. Each of us now navigates competing claims of transparency and privacy every time we swipe a credit card, download an app, or pass through a smart home. Focusing on individual violations and litigation in the courts, a strategy that once served to protect (some) Americans privacy, is insufficient in the present. For a shot at privacy in the digital ageto say nothing of the coming metaversewe will need to envision privacy as a collective social good in need of collective solutions: strong public regulation that systematically reins in the parties who trample it.

There is another lesson to be drawn from Gajdas history. From the earliest days of the republic, privacy law has best served the most privileged in American society: those with considerable clout and resources at their disposal. To enact meaningful protections today, advocates will need to challenge the uneven allotment of privacy in the United States, taking careful account of who has and hasnt been served by past victories. If they do, Americans may yet summon defenses of privacy responsive to the needs and desires of ordinary citizens.

This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline Privacy Isnt Dead.

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How Privacy Prevails in the Age of Big Tech - The Atlantic

A federal court yesterday ruled that a Florida voter suppression law enacted last year infringes on the right to free speech by forcing voter registration groups to make false claims to potential voters when trying to register them.

The case HTFF v. Laurel Lee was brought by Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters (HTFF), a group represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Fair Elections Centerand Baker McKenzie.

Ruling in three cases consolidated with HTFF v. Lee, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker mandated that for the next 10 years Florida must seek preclearance from the court before changing voting laws that would restrict voting drop boxes, voting by mail, third-party voter registration organizations or assistance to voters.

We applaud the decision of the court to strike down forced speech provisions, enshrine voting rights and to establish protections for voting rights in Florida under preclearance, said Caren Short, senior supervising attorney for the SPLCs Voting Rights Practice Group. We have been proud to work alongside allies like the League of Women Voters, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP and Florida Rising in challenging barriers to voting, and we will continue standing with them and Florida communities against barriers to voting.

Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters Corp. is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that focuses voter registration efforts on new voters, particularly youth, communities of color and people released from prison after completing their sentences.

The Florida law, SB 90, compelled HTFF and similar organizations to communicate a false, state-sponsored message to potential voters that the organizations might not submit their applications on time.

Fair Elections Center and the SPLC filed suit on behalf of HTFF on June 14, 2021, alleging that the new law is void for vagueness under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, that it compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment and that it prevents organizations from exercising their First Amendment rights of expression and association.

We founded HTFF to defend the voice of our community, so we are proud that our right to make our voices heard through organizing and free speech has been affirmed by todays ruling, said HTTF President and Co-founder Rosemary McCoy. However, organizations like HTFF are still needed to defend our communities right to vote, and we plan to redouble our efforts to empower our community to vote.

SB 90, enacted by politicians weaponizing misinformation about the 2020 presidential election, created a series of barriers to voting. In addition to the restriction on voter registration organizations, it required voters to provide a state ID number or the last four digits of their Social Security number to obtain a mail ballot, providing no alternative if a voter has neither identification number.

It also shortened the period during which a voter can remain on the states vote-by-mail list, which entitles them to receive a mail ballot automatically. It modified rules for observers in ways that could disrupt election administration, and it restricted private individuals and entities from providing rides, chairs, umbrellas, food and water to voters waiting in line to cast a ballot.

The court has delivered a victory for voting rights organizations over new barriers to community voter registration drives created last year by Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida state legislators, said Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel with Fair Elections Center. This decision vindicates the critical role of building community trust in voting and political participation that our client and other organizations fill. The ruling has established SB 90 violates our clients freedom of speech, and we call on Floridas Legislature and governor to stop enacting barriers to Floridians making their voices heard in our democracy.

Added Debra Dandeneau, partner at Baker McKenzie, We were proud to lend our pro bono time, energy and talent to this victory for voting rights organizations and their freedom of speech.

The case was consolidated for trial with these others:

League of Women Voters of Florida, Inc. et al. v. Lee et al.The plaintiffs argue that SB 90s drop box restrictions, mail-in ballot repeat request requirement, volunteer assistance ban, deceptive registration warning and food and water ban violate the First and 14th Amendments.

Florida State Conference of Branches and Youth Units of NAACP et al. v. Lee et al.The plaintiffs argue that SB 90 creates unnecessary barriers and burdens that disproportionately impact Black and Latinx voters and voters with disabilities, violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the First, 14th and 15th Amendments, and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Florida Rising Together et al. v. Lee et al.The plaintiffs challenge SB 90s limitations of the availability of drop boxes, the addition of identification requirements to request a vote-by-mail ballot, the prohibition of assistance to voters waiting in long lines and the imposition of new restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations.

Photo at top: The Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee. (Credit: iStock)

Excerpt from:
'Victory for Voting Rights': Federal judge overturns Florida requirement that voter registration groups give misleading information - Southern Poverty...

In recent years, discussions around freedom of speech have expanded beyond debates on the limits of the First Amendment and into a broader conversation on the culture of free expression in the U.S. Some argue that Americans should not only have a right to speak their minds, but also a right to speak their minds without fear of being shamed or shunned. Others contend that freedom of speech does not entail freedom from social consequences for your speech.

In a recent YouGov survey, we attempted to distill common beliefs about the countrys culture of speech into brief statements and measured the extent to which Americans agree or disagree with them. While there are drawbacks to agree/disagree-style questions, they are useful for comparing attitudes among different groups such as Republicans and Democrats.

While most Americans 64% agree that Americans are generally free to express their views, we find significant partisan divides on many issues relating to free speech, including what threatens it and what limitations should be applied to it. The vast majority of Americans including majorities of Republicans and Democrats agree that part of exercising free speech is having to deal with people who disagree with you. Far fewer less than half of Republicans and Democrats agree that limits on the speech of some people can expand free speech for people overall.

Agreeing to disagree

One thing 84% of Americans can agree on is that part of exercising free speech is having to deal with people who disagree with you. Only 6% disagreed with this statement. Of all the questions asked, this produced the smallest partisan gap an equal share of Democrats (89%) and Republicans (90%) say free speech involves disagreement.

Free from consequences

Most Americans (70%) agree that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech, while 14% disagree. Though a majority of all groups we studied agree, there are some divides. Adults 30 and under (56%) are less likely to agree than adults 65 and older (81%). Republicans (60%) are less likely to agree than Democrats (85%).

Biting your tongue

A majority of Americans (61%) agree that it isnt always a bad thing when people avoid publicly expressing views that may offend others, while only 18% disagree. Some groups were more likely to agree with this than others, including Democrats (74%) and Americans 65 and older (72%). Adults under 30 were significantly less likely to agree (48%) and more likely to say they were unsure (34%).

Protecting civil rights

About half of Americans (54%) agree that we should generally discourage people from expressing views that advocate removing the civil rights of others, while about a quarter (26%) disagree with this. While all groups we looked at were more likely to agree than disagree that we should discourage people from advocating for the removal of civil rights, fewer Republicans (47%) than Democrats (71%) agreed.

The marketplace of ideas

About half of Americans (52%) agree that the truth is most likely to emerge when ideas can compete in unregulated public discourse. A significant portion 35% are unsure and only 14% disagree. Americans 65 and older are about twice as likely to agree (62%) as are adults under 30 (34%). Other groups we looked at with relatively high rates of agreement include: Republicans (61%), Americans living in the West (61%), and people in families earning $100,000 or more each year (65%).

Keeping up with the times

Half of Americans (52%) agree that the norms of socially acceptable speech are changing too quickly to keep up with, while 26% disagree with this. Republicans (68%) are more likely to say its hard to keep up with changing norms than Democrats (41%) are. Americans 45 and older are more likely to say its hard to keep up than adults under 45.

Misunderstood

Nearly half of Americans (49%) say they often worry that a view they express will be misinterpreted in a negative way, while 32% say they dont often worry about this. Of the groups examined, Trump supporters (61%) were the most likely to agree.

Top-down tyranny

Americans are divided on whether the government poses the biggest threat to speech: 45% agree it does, while 32% say it doesnt. Republicans (69%) are more than twice as likely as Democrats (28%) to say the government poses the biggest threat to speech.

Testing the limits

Americans are almost twice as likely to agree (41%) than disagree (22%) that people who test the limits of free speech by sharing controversial views I disagree with are making a positive contribution to society. Among the groups analyzed that are most likely to agree with this are Trump supporters (56%), Republicans (54%), and men (46%).

Good intentions

Americans are somewhat more likely to agree (40%) than disagree (31%) that what matters is the intent of the person speaking, not how what they say is understood. Americans 65 and older are evenly divided (39% agree, 39% disagree), while adults under 30 are twice as likely to agree (39%) than disagree (17%).

Limits on some

Almost half of Americans (46%) disagree that sometimes limiting the speech of a small number of people expands freedom of speech for people overall, while 28% agree with this. Black Americans (36%) and Democrats (40%) were somewhat more likely to agree than to disagree.

Carl Bialik contributed to this article

See the toplines and crosstabs from this U.S. News Poll

Methodology: This U.S. News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online between March 21 - 23, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the 2018 American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as news interest and 2020 Presidential votes (or non-votes). Respondents were selected from YouGovs opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. citizens. The margin of error is approximately 4% for the entire sample.

Image: Getty

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Democrats and Republicans agree that exercising free speech means having to deal with disagreement - YouGov US

PHILADELPHIA, March 29, 2022 A new study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education analyzes the state of free speech at 26 Michigan colleges and universities. State of the Speech Codes: Michigan finds that well over half of those colleges maintain free expression policies that restrict or could too easily be interpreted to restrict student speech.

Too many Michigan college students study in the shadow of restrictive or overly broad policies that threaten their rights, said FIRE Program Officer Ryan Ansloan, who authored the report. I hope this report lights a fire under college admins to re-evaluate these policies and protect student and faculty rights.

FIND OUT HOW MUCH PROTECTED SPEECH YOUR COLLEGE RESTRICTS

The report includes new research on policies at 11 institutions and reviews and updates the ratings of 15 institutions already included in FIREs Spotlight database. FIRE rates schools as red light, yellow light, or green light institutions based on how much speech protected by First Amendment standards their policies restrict in a number of categories, including protest, online speech, harassment, and civility. Private schools that promise free speech rights to their students are rated using the same standards as public ones, while private colleges that clearly place other values above free speech rights earn a Warning rating.

Over a quarter of Michigan institutions 27% received an overall red light rating, FIREs lowest rating, for maintaining speech codes that clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech. Universities with a red light rating include Aquinas College, Davenport University, Grand Rapids Community College, Lake Superior State University, Muskegon Community College, Oakland University, and Western Michigan University.

Only one of the institutions FIRE reviewed, Michigan Technological University, does not maintain any policies that compromise student expression, earning it FIREs highest green light rating. This rating is held by only 58 colleges nationwide. Meanwhile, half of Michigans institutions earned a yellow light rating. While less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still prohibit or have an impermissible chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech and must be revised.

The report also notes that the kinds of restrictive policies adopted at Michigan universities, including technology and harassment policies, occur in Michigan with roughly the same regularity as they do in the rest of the country. The report analyzes the problematic policies by school and includes FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoffs five ways university presidents can improve the state of free speech on campus.

Overly vague and broad policies can affect not only college students, but also faculty members. One such problematic policy at Ferris State University was recently used as an excuse to oust professor Barry Mehler. Mehler ran afoul of the universitys excessively broad Employee and Student Dignity Policy when he used profanity in a class introduction.

Its tempting to put off policy reform because policies seem theoretical, but bad policies can quickly lead to censorship and rights violations, said Ansloan. FIRE wants to make sure that doesnt happen to other Michigan students and faculty.

FIRE stands ready to defend students and faculty members whose rights are threatened on campus. We also invite college administrators to work with us to reform their institutions policies.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of students and faculty members at Americas colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience the essential qualities of liberty.

CONTACT:

Katie Kortepeter, Media Relations Associate, FIRE: 215-717-3473; media@thefire.org

Read more from the original source:
Study shows just 2% of Michigan students attend a university that respects free speech - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Deputy prime minister DominicRaabhas said his plan to replace Labours Human Rights Act will would ensure the principle of free speech became a legal trump card.

The justice secretary said his proposals would stop free speech and democratic debate from being whittled away by wokery and political correctness.

The governments plan to replace the landmark Human Rights Act with a new UK Bill of Rights currently out for consultation will better protect media freedom, Mr Raab claimed.

The senior minister said free speech had to be given different status in the pecking order of rights.

Mr Raab told the Daily Mail: Effectively, free speech will be given what will amount to trump card status in a whole range of areas.

He said: The thrust is going to be making sure that when we balance rights, whether its the right to free speech and the right to privacy or other rights, we make sure that the greatest overriding importance and weight is attached to free speech.

Despite the promised changes, MrRaabsaid checks would remain on free speech to prevent the incitement of violence or promotion of terrorism.

We will still be clamping down on those who try and use either media or free speech to incite violence, to radicalise terrorists, or to threaten children. All of those safeguards will be in place, he said.

Mr Raab said: But weve got to be able to strengthen free speech, the liberty that guards all of our other freedoms, and stop it being whittled away surreptitiously, sometimes without us really being conscious of it.

I feel very strongly that the parameters of free speech and democratic debate are being whittled away, whether by the privacy issue or whether its wokery and political correctness.

He added: So it will have a different status in the pecking order of rights and I think that will go a long way to protecting this countrys freedom of speech and our history, which has always very strongly protected freedom of speech.

MrRaabalso told the paper the UK Bill of Rights would make deportation mandatory for all foreign criminals jailed for at least a year.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph reports that, as part of a wider reform of parole proceedings, MrRaabis set to take back powers to override the Parole Board when it comes to the release of dangerous criminals from jail.

It follows public outcry at the decision to release double child killer and rapist Colin Pitchfork from jail.

Excerpt from:
Raab vows to protect free speech from wokery with plan to scrap Human Rights Act - The Independent