Racists’ ‘safe space.’ A new report from The Center for Countering Digital Hatred cites the free-speech protections of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for enabling Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to broadly ignore antisemitic posts.
■ The Center says it reported 714 posts containing “anti-Jewish hatred”—viewed a collective 7.3 million times—and the companies failed to remove 84% of them.
■ Its report calls for an overhaul of the act’s Section 230.
■ A former president of the ACLU: 230 “worked very well until the era of platformization … where the gatekeeper function was taken over by these giant tech platforms.”
■ Republican-sponsored legislation would force the White House to disclose its requests for social media companies to censor content—especially about COVID-19 vaccines—that it considers “disinformation.”
■ Apple has kicked a dating app for anti-vaxxers out of its App Store.
On campus …
‘Will the Constitution fail teachers?’ A University of Florida law professor anticipates lawsuits over bans on the teaching of critical race theory—and spells out what might hold up and what might not.
■ An Ohio State University professor emeritus of English: Attacks on critical race theory threaten democracy.
■ The University of Mississippi has settled with a faculty member fired after complaining last year that the university “prioritizes racist donors over all else.”
■ A federal appeals court has denied immunity to University of Iowa officials who, in the words of TechDirt’s Tim Cushing, “banned a Christian student group just because they didn’t like it.”
■ Commenting on that case, columnist George Will labels academia “a compound of moral arrogance and political authoritarianism.”
■ A federal appeals court in Ohio has ruled that a citizen can’t be kicked out of a public meeting just for offending, antagonizing or criticizing a governing body or its members during a public-comment period.
Historic news. The new president and CEO of The Associated Press is Daisy Veerasingham—the first woman, the first person of color and the first person from outside of the United States to hold that job.
■ From the AP’s account: “Her appointment speaks to the changing portrait of the AP, where 40% of the company’s revenue, double what it was 15 years ago, is now generated outside of the United States.”
‘The First Amendment does not protect only speech that inoffensively and artfully articulates a person’s point of view.’ A California appeals court has struck down a law that threatened fines and jail time for nursing home workers who intentionally failed to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns.
■ The co-founder of an anti-animal-products nonprofit warns that the First Amendment is under siege by the meat industry.
‘F**k Biden’ sign survives. A Donald Trump supporter has won an appeal to keep delivering that profane message from her New Jersey home.
■ New York Times readers took issue with an editorial defending “every American’s right to curse the president.”
Masks and the First. Utah Sen. Mike Lee suggests government mandates requiring people to wear masks as protection against COVID-19 violate the right to free speech.
■ Wonkette’s Jamie Lynn Crofts on Republicans’ suit against a rule that U.S. House members wear masks: “This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.”
‘The right to free speech applies to the right to ask for help.’ The ACLU is among those raising a flag about the Peoria, Ill., City Council’s consideration of a crackdown on panhandlers.
■ Street preachers who were restricted from criticizing a gay-pride event in Tennessee are taking their case to a federal appeals court.
Rat rising. The National Labor Relations Board says the giant inflatable rat that labor activists have deployed to protest non-union businesses nationwide is protected speech.
