■ But they can still advertise.
■ The new policy is aimed at limiting the influence of what Columbia Journalism Review calls “networks of shadowy, politically backed ‘local news websites’ designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data.”
■ Here’s Facebook’s statement.
■ Irvine, Calif., Mayor Christina Shea faces a First Amendment lawsuit, accused of blocking a critic’s comments on her Facebook page.
‘Third-person references … hide the fact that [they’re] one and the same.’ The Daily Beast: Donald Trump’s “official” super political action committee has launched a news website.
■ Washington Post book critic Ron Charles: Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s claim a fictional lawyer on CBS’ The Good Fight has defamed him could “jeopardize … creativity—and generate a host of lawsuits.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones ponders: Would a Trump loss in November be bad news for the news biz?
Masks and the First. A Wesleyan University professor explains why mask mandates don’t violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech—or religion.
■ But businesses may need more than a legal argument to persuade intransigent customers.
■ Free-speech experts are calling on schools not to punish students who share photos of other students going maskless.
Zoom fume. New Jersey’s Stockton University is reviewing disciplinary action against a student who used an image of Trump as his background for a class session on Zoom—a thing he says is protected by the First Amendment.
■ Podcast (with transcript): The pandemic’s effect on campus free speech.
Facial recognition’s free-speech defense. One of the nation’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers, Floyd Abrams, is taking on a new client: Clearview AI, whose social-media scraping tech has given its government and business clients the power, in The New York Times’ words, “to identify nearly anyone with just a photograph.”
■ Clearview client Macy’s faces a federal suit in Chicago alleging it’s violated Illinois’ biometric-privacy law by using the technology on its customers.
■ Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director David Greene says President Trump’s campaign against TikTok “raises serious First Amendment concerns.”
‘All I was doing was videotaping.’ A man whom Gary, Ind., police arrested as he recorded another person’s arrest is considering filing a First Amendment lawsuit.
■ The Free Speech Center’s First Amendment Encyclopedia: “Recent court decisions have recognized a First Amendment right to film police interactions.”
■ San Diego cops have been writing tickets under a 103-year-old law that outlaws “seditious language,” but that a public defender says “seems to be highly unconstitutional.”
‘No-protest zone’ protest. Death-penalty opponents are going to court to fight an Indiana State Police ban on demonstrations outside the gates of a facility that houses a U.S. Bureau of Prisons execution chamber.
■ An anti-racism group is suing Louisville’s police department over protest restrictions that include requiring pedestrians to stick to the sidewalks.