freespeech
Last week, Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that the state could soon require public schools to teach the Bible and the Ten Commandments, including requiring religious text be included in all classrooms. "Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom," Walters said last Thursday, "to ensure that this historical understanding is there for every student in the state of Oklahoma." The statement came just days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the state could not approve a religious ...
Reason
Campus protests that started out as anti-Israel and too often slid over into flat-out antisemitism and pro-terrorist advocacy shocked much of the nation in recent months. It's enough to make anybody wonder what kind of education is going on at institutions of higher education, and just what has happened to many of the students attending them—especially at elite schools. But one body that really should butt out unless the protests cross beyond the bounds of protected speech is the government. State attempts to police speech have a lousy history and threaten to turn even the most hateful protest...
Reason
Last week, a federal judge ruled that B.G., a rapper known for the hit 1999 song "Bling Bling," must give the government copies of the lyrics to any new songs as a condition of his supervised release. While prosecutors can generally place a wide range of otherwise illegal restrictions on released prisoners' conduct, critics argue this restriction is an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech. In 2012, B.G., whose real name is Christopher Dorsey, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for illegal gun possession and obstruction charges. After serving 11 years, Dorsey was released in February. In...
Reason
Masameer County was supposed to be Saudi Arabia's big break in the comedy world. The online cartoon, similar in tone to South Park and Family Guy, had been growing in popularity as the kingdom was undergoing social reforms. When Netflix picked up Masameer County in 2021, it quickly topped the viewership charts in Saudi Arabia. And you didn't have to be Saudi to enjoy it. The citizens of Masameer, a fictional Saudi metropolis, suffer from the same everyday problems as the rest of us: annoying viral trends, spoiled nepo babies, obsessive online nerds, pandemic-induced social isolation, and badly...
Reason
Two laws requiring age verification online have been paused by federal courts. The laws in Indiana and Mississippi are now on hold as legal challenges to them play out. The Indiana law (Senate Bill 17) says visitors to websites that display pornography or other "adult oriented" content that is "harmful to minors" must submit a copy of their driver's license or otherwise verify that they're at least 18 years old. The Mississippi law (House Bill 1126, also known as the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act) says social media platforms must verify people's ages before letting them crea...
Reason
"The First Amendment is spinning out of control," Columbia law professor Tim Wu warns in a New York Times essay. While Wu ostensibly objects to Supreme Court decisions that he thinks have interpreted freedom of speech too broadly, his complaint amounts to a rejection of the premise that the principle should be applied consistently, especially when it benefits speakers and messages he does not like. The immediate provocation for Wu's diatribe is yesterday's Supreme Court decisions in two cases challenging Florida and Texas laws that aimed to restrict content moderation on social media. Although...
Reason
The Supreme Court ruled today in two cases that could have a major impact on how social media platforms operate and how the government can interfere on behalf of political speech on these platforms. The cases (NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice) were brought by two tech industry trade groups—NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association—that opposed social media moderation laws in Florida and Texas. The Court unanimously agreed to vacate decisions by the 11th Circuit and the 5th Circuit—which upheld a preliminary injunction on the Florida law (finding it likely did v...
Reason
TikTok is in trouble: In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation that forces ByteDance, the popular social media app's Chinese parent company, to sell its majority stake to a U.S.-based firm. If it fails to do this, the app will be banned in the United States. Various dubious arguments have been deployed against TikTok, but Congress' stated prime motive to force its divestiture is that the app's Chinese owners are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and thus having their tech on so many Americans' phones is a dire national security risk. The CCP is an authoritarian ...
Reason
At last, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a free man. Why was he ever locked up in the first place? Before the Justice Department dropped its request for Assange to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, he had toplead guilty to violating the Espionage Act. That cleared the way for Assange to walk out of the maximum-security prison in London where he was being held. But it also sets a legal precedent that threatens free speech and journalism worldwide. Assange isn't a spy. He's a publisher, guilty of embarrassing the U.S. government. "Really anybody who is concerned about press freedom s...
Reason
In June 2022, the Supreme Court clarified the constitutional test for gun control laws, saying they must be "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." To illustrate the public safety implications of that ruling, Bloomberg Law reported last year that the decision had "forced the Justice Department to abandon a firearms charge against an Iranian American drug user with suspected ties to foreign terrorism." As reporters Ben Penn and Seamus Hughes told it, "The firearm charge against Ali Hemani, 26, appears to have served the same purpose as when it's often brought...
Reason
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