Smile. But … Taking a selfie with your ballot may seem like a celebration of democracy, but it’s illegal in at least 15 states.
■ It’s newly legal—and popular—in Michigan.
■ Columnist Corey Friedman: “Ballot photo bans are ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud. … But voters involved in such schemes would be more likely to send photos privately than plaster them on social media.” (Image: Valentin Amosenkov.)
■ A civil rights lawyer sounds a First Amendment alarm about states that ban “electioneering” clothing at polling places.
■ Washington, D.C., outlaws that, too.
‘Counterprotestors should not be allowed to openly carry firearms to events that organizers designate to be gun-free.’ Law profs at Yale and the University of Alabama write in The Washington Post: Peaceful assembly can’t happen without the option of banning guns.
■ In an online video conversation, Free Speech Center Director Ken Paulson and author Robert Giles revisit another era of great protest: May 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State University students and wounded nine others.
‘This is a very pro-First Amendment Court—liberals and conservatives.’ Free-speech champion lawyer Floyd Abrams is optimistic the Supreme Court will consider whether a high school can punish a student for criticizing the school in a social media post published off-campus.
■ An Arizona State University student radio station manager is suing on First Amendment grounds after her removal for a tweet critical of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot by Kenosha, Wis., police in August.
■ A Kansas City Star editorial: “A Kansas university threatens a student—and everyone’s right to free speech.”
Borat and the First. New York Daily News writer Eliyahu Federman says satiric filmmaker Sacha Baron Cohen’s call to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media platforms from liability for content users post, “is as close as it gets to someone biting the hand that feeds him.”
■ Santa Clara University School of Law student Jess Miers: “If you’re upset that Twitter and Facebook keep removing content that favors your political viewpoints, your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.”
■ CNET: Everything you need to know about Section 230 and free speech on social media.
■ The Verge: Meet the man next in line to run the Federal Communications Commission and lead the Trump administration’s “war on platform moderation.”
■ A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to ban TikTok in the U.S. Nov. 12.
‘Conservatives know what censorship is, and it is people not reading their tweets.’ Wonkette’s Robyn Pennacchia: “In reality, where the rest of us live, conservatives are not only not censored on social media, they are promoted.”
■ George Washington University law prof Jonathan Turley: Twitter should “make no policy abridging the freedom of speech or the press.”
■ Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, retiring after a 50-year career: “As a cartoonist and a journalist, I start with a pretty-close-to-absolute First Amendment-oriented right to free speech.”
‘Fatwa on your head?’ A federal appeals court says Detroit’s public transit system violated the First Amendment when it rejected ads bearing that phrase and others encouraging people to abandon Islam.■ New Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins the Supreme Court just in time to hear what the ABA Journal calls a blockbuster religious freedom case.
■ University of California at Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky: The court could reverse a half-century of finding “stopping discrimination to be more important than protecting a right to discriminate.”
■ The ACLU is going to court against a California county on behalf of a nonprofit group denied a COVID-19 outreach contract because it had been critical of police.
‘Unintended consequence.’ A councilman who supported a new Columbia, S.C., law forbidding “hate speech” has been dismayed to learn its first targets have included people who are Black and homeless.
■ Louisiana’s high court has struck down under the First Amendment a law requiring sex offenders to carry ID cards branding themselves as such.