​While missiles are flying and bombs detonating in the Middle East, domestic political rhetoric has predictably become progressively more bombastic and incendiary. As in all wars, the First Amendment will be tested by the desire to shut down speech judged to be warmongering, unpatriotic, or just plain stupid.

It was off to the races after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called President Trump’s strikes on Iran “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” adding: “I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city – you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.”

When we read this we had the same thought as millions of other Americans – yes, they will be safe here. No sanctioned religious police will cuff Iranian-American women about the ears if they appear in public without a headscarf on Lexington Avenue, or rape them in a police station if they are arrested. Iranian-American students, artists, and community leaders need not fear being slowly strangled to death by having a steel cable put around their necks before being lifted into the air by a crane.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist in New York, shot back at the mayor: “I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours.”

We would add that if Iran’s ambition to build a nuclear bomb is not arrested, then no New Yorker will be safe. But let us leave that point and examine how the First Amendment comes into this debate.

We predict that before the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington’s Tidal Basin, official threats will be leveled against the speech rights of critics of the attack on Iran. We also expect a few lonely voices in Hollywood, academia, and other centers of monolithic opinion will be hounded, harassed, and threatened if they dare break with the received views of the cultural cognoscenti.

With rhetorical bombs bursting in air, we should keep in mind that the United States has a history of government trying to crack down on “unpatriotic” speech on one side, and violence to end participation in a war on the other. During World War One, the Woodrow Wilson administration secured a 10-year prison sentence against presidential candidate Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party for criticizing America’s entry into that conflict. During the Nixon years, the Weather Underground planted more than two dozen bombs to protest the Vietnam War.

In the face of a new war, we should keep in mind that the First Amendment protects speech that is stupid, false, unpatriotic, warmongering, and ungrounded in fact. The hot exchange between Mayor Mamdani and Alinejad shows that speech and counter-speech can be pointed, polemical, and angry – hallmarks of American political speech since before we were a country – without resorting to laws or mob action to punish the speaker for speaking.
​
President Trump said on Monday that the military action against Iran could last for weeks. As events roll forward, we should keep our emotions in check and respect the speech rights of all – even if we have no respect for what is said.

Anonymity online can be a mask that allows people to say ugly, hateful or untrue things without taking responsibility for them. But it can also be a shield that protects women hiding from abusers, whistleblowers one step ahead of their pursuers, journalists reaching out to confidential sources about wrongdoing, and consumers searching online for answers to questions about their health that they’d rather not have anyone know about.

This is why the current effort by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to use emergency subpoenas to force Big Tech companies to reveal the identities of Americans who make critical posts about ICE is so dangerous. If this practice sticks, it will likely migrate to other federal agencies and erode anonymity online.

But the shedding of anonymous speech might come by a different route – not from executive-branch meddling or legislative mistakes, but from lawsuits claiming harms from child internet “addiction.”

Dan Frieth of the digital anti-censorship advocacy group, Reclaim The Net, listened to five hours of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in a Los Angeles civil case and distilled it to a jarring and important warning – the age of anonymity could be coming to an end at the hands of the trial bar.

Zuckerberg testified in one of 1,600 lawsuits over internet addiction. In this case, a woman claimed that at age nine Meta’s Instagram addicted her, plunging her into a hell of anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts.

Frieth notes that the science of internet addiction is “genuinely disputed.” He writes:

“None of this means the harms alleged are fabricated. It means the word ‘addiction’ is doing heavy rhetorical and legal work, and the policy consequences are far beyond anything a jury in Los Angeles will decide.

“‘Addiction’ is how you get a public health emergency. A public health emergency is how you get emergency powers and make it easier for people to overlook constitutional protections. Emergency powers applied to the internet mean mandatory access controls. And mandatory access controls on the internet mean the end of anonymous and pseudonymous speech.

“When social media is classified as a drug, access to it becomes a medical and regulatory matter” justifying “identity verification, access controls, and a surveillance architecture that follows users across every platform and device.”

Frieth notes that a win for the plaintiff in this case would strip the current law protecting platform design decisions. This danger is not theoretical. Frieth reports that Zuckerberg repeatedly suggested that any age verification mandate – and thus identification – be shifted from platforms to owners of operating systems. Zuckerberg would thus toss his liability hot potato from Instagram to Apple and Google.

“This is more than age verification,” Frieth concludes. “It is a national digital ID layer baked into the two operating systems that run the majority of the world’s smartphones.”

There are a lot of competing interests in this case – the safety of children, the nature of the internet, and the value of free speech. Juries don’t have to balance these equities. They can just side with the plaintiff and inadvertently make policy for U.S. tech – and by extension, the world.
​
Any new approach to child safety should not require adults to give up speech rights recognized in this country since Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote collectively as the pseudonymous “Publius” in The Federalist Papers.

Will Smith sang of Miami, “the heat is on all night.” In Miami Beach, it’s on all day too, especially if one is brazen enough to criticize the mayor.

A couple of weeks ago, resident Raquel Pacheco left a hot comment on a Facebook post by Mayor Steven Meiner. The mayor had posted, “Miami Beach is a safe haven for everyone,” adding, “We will always stand firm against any discrimination.”

In response, Pacheco commented:

“The guy who consistently calls for the death of all Palestinians, tried to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings, and REFUSES to stand up for the LGBTQ community in any way (even leaves the room when they vote on related matters) wants you to know that you’re all welcome here.”

She then added three clown emojis.

Two police officers were soon dispatched to knock on her door. One of the officers was later identified in a photo taken at a residential campaign event for the mayor in October.

Both Pacheco and Meiner are Jewish, but they have very different views when it comes to Israel, culture, and politics. To be clear, Pacheco’s post was hyperbolic. The mayor has never called for the death of Palestinians. He did, however, attempt to break the city’s lease with a theater that was showing what he considered to be a film that contained anti-Israeli hate speech. As for LGBTQ issues, community reviews are far from glowing.

Pacheco’s comment and additional replies contained inaccuracies, sarcasm, and exaggeration. But nothing in it justified a police visit, which could be taken as a thinly disguised attempt at intimidation. Agree or disagree with her words, they strike us as a traditionally, and perhaps uniquely, American approach to political discourse – which is to say, rude –  yet guaranteed by an at-times inconvenient First Amendment. This isn’t Germany, after all, or the UK, where comedians are arrested for tasteless jokes.

Which leads us to wonder, was it the clown emojis that pushed the mayor and his team over the edge? We wouldn’t envy anyone the task of explaining emojis to James Madison and his fellow founders, but we feel confident they would recognize them as symbolic communication, the substance of all human language, and therefore something to be given a wide berth when confronted by thin-skinned authorities.

The only truly scary line uttered by anyone involved in this entire imbroglio came from one of the attending police officers. Whether speaking on behalf of his boss or not, he told Pacheco:

​“What we’re just trying to prevent is someone else getting agitated or agreeing with the statement.”

Send in the clowns.

​The public statements we post on social media are, by definition, available to all. Federal investigators often have good reason to access some of this information from social media, some of the time. How far that power goes is a line for the courts to draw.

However, that line – meaning the First Amendment – is clearly crossed when the government conducts mass surveillance of social media posts not because of a particular suspicion of bad behavior, but to make a case against targeted people.

Taylor Lorenz reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is building out a massive social media surveillance program. It is searching posts and looking for “speech that, essentially, they feel they can deport people over. They can take lawful, legal speech and convert it into fresh leads for enforcement raids.”

Now add The Intercept’s disturbing report suggesting that ICE is so obsessed with its reputation that it wants to track any “negative” social media discourse directed toward it.

Such a program would scrape a user’s internet history and associations, then use facial recognition to create a dossier composed of a “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.” Not to mention the possible infringements of the First Amendment. Such surveillance programs deter people from expressing certain ideas. This is precisely the kind of content-based restriction and viewpoint discrimination that courts often treat as presumptively unconstitutional.

Nor should we forget about the right to associate for expressive purposes. Without an utterly compelling justification, government actions cannot “burden association” (in this case, citizens sharing a discourse of critique against the government). Thinking of social media as an electronic sidewalk might help here, making the removal of anti-government apps akin to clearing sidewalks of speech the government doesn’t like.

To quote Taylor Lorenz again, all this amounts to a “mass, automated digital dragnet.” And few acts of surveillance are more anti-constitutional than warrantless dragnets. Dragnets are a symptom of policy enforcement inspired by animus to speech and activism. From a First Amendment perspective, this looks like retaliation. And the fact that social media seems to be increasingly used as the basis of crackdowns amounts to what Lorenz calls the gradual “militarization of our data.”

We live in an era in which our digital and physical selves have become indistinguishable. Government monitoring our social media and internet presence 24/7, then using it to profile us, enables government regulation of speech. Add ICE’s new capability to track us by our location histories, and we have a system not far from tapping phones or raiding homes.
​
Whether the government’s intrusion is analog or digital, it harms free speech.

​The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about a fire that broke out backstage in a theater: “The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”

In our time, deepfake audio calls prompt people to wire their life savings to thieves, change their vote, or pay off sextortionists. One of the worst aspects of AI deepfake technology is that it can put actual authorities in the position of the frantic clown.

Denmark has had enough. The Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, said: “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”

Danish legislators are now supporting a measure to grant every citizen a right to control uses of their image, likeness, and voice, similar to “right of publicity” laws in many U.S. states that give Americans property rights to commercial uses of their identities. Under a proposal expected to soon pass Parliament, Danes will gain sweeping legal control over any digital recreation. This is important for Americans, because European law often sets standards in the global internet that adjust the policies of U.S. tech companies.

This Danish proposal, at first glance, might seem like overdue privacy armor against criminals, stalkers, propagandists, and hostile intelligence services. If Denmark passes this “right to your likeness,” as it appears poised to do, Danes will be able to demand takedowns and seek compensation. Platforms could face penalties for failing to comply.

But there’s a catch – a threat to free speech if Europeans and Americans are not careful in how such laws are drafted and enforced.

The Danish legislation does include carve-outs for “satire” and “parody,” meant to preserve comedy, creative expression, and political commentary. That is a good step. But these categories don’t explicitly protect other forms of speech. Such laws could easily be used to punish fair uses of AI, from commentary and criticism to historical fiction, docudramas, and much more.

If the parameters of an anti-deepfake law are too narrow, risk-averse platforms and creators will pull back. Algorithms will over-filter, even with exemptions. Studios and satirists will second-guess viral impressions, political cartoons, and docudramas depicting real people. Defamation law already chills speech. A sweeping likeness-ownership regime could freeze it solid.

When this issue came up in the U.S. Congress last year, the Motion Picture Association and civil liberties groups met with Members of Congress to craft a balanced approach. This approach, one with growing bipartisan support, would protect people from outrageous AI abuses – such as having one’s image and voice used for false endorsements, to perpetrate fraud, or for revenge porn – while fully protecting a wide range of AI uses in creative commentary, art, journalism, documentary work, and political speech.

No less important, Americans are learning that the best anti-AI filters are the ones we install in our brains.

Facebook is a great instructor, exposing us to one ridiculous scenario after another. Users are learning to ignore home security footage of rabbits gleefully jumping on backyard trampolines, or wolves and their cat friends ringing doorbells. As we get deeper into this age, we’re learning to relax our fingers and not share the ridiculous, the impossible, and the unlikely.
​
AI challenges our sense of reality. But it is also strengthening our patience and skepticism.

Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, followed up on his committee’s report on how Europe enforces censorship of Americans on U.S. platforms by taking his complaints to the censors themselves.

The Ohio Congressman led a bipartisan delegation to explain to regulators in Brussels, London, and Dublin exactly why Americans find European censorship of American social media platforms so disturbing.

“America innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates,” complained a member of the delegation, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI). In an interview in Brussels, Fitzgerald noted that “there are seven corporations that are currently listed as gatekeepers by the DSA (Digital Services Act) and six of the seven are American corporations” being punished for their speech.
Did this message land?

“Nothing we heard in Europe eased our concerns about the (EU’s) Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, or (the UK) Online Safety Act,” Jordan said. “These sweeping regulations create a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.”

Like so many media outlets, Spotify was caught in the crossfire between free speech and medical authority during the pandemic. Joe Rogan on his popular podcast interviewed a vaccine-skeptical doctor who asserted that the antiparasitic medication, Ivermectin, can cure COVID-19. Spotify also removed “War Room,” the Steve Bannon podcast for calling on President Trump to seize CDC Director Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray and put their “heads on spikes.”

In this investigation, we caution House investigators to always keep in mind that Spotify has a First Amendment right to ban Bannon, curtail Rogan, and play the treacly “Dr. Fauci Say” (“Doctor Fauci, save me, I’m going insane”!) 24 hours a day. The First Amendment allows Spotify to make its own editorial decisions regarding Ivermectin or anything else. It can only be dissuaded by the free market of its listeners if it should decide to dedicate itself 24/7 to ridiculing President Trump or former President Biden, the Bible, the Quran, or apple pie.

If it decided to pull Bannon for making a graphic and menacing statement, Spotify was well within its rights to do so. And when rocker Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify in protest of Rogan’s COVID coverage – agree or disagree – he was fully exercising his First Amendment right to free association. Or in this case, disassociation.

The First Amendment only restricts the government’s ability to abridge speech.

The House Judiciary Committee should, then, be commended for correctly targeting its investigation on how the Biden administration and the European Union may have used coercive state power to bludgeon Spotify into censoring itself for them. Such “jawboning” from powerful regulators can never be treated as mere suggestions. It is more like the Mafia’s protection racket shakedowns: You have a nice little media company there, shame if anything happened to it.

At the time Spotify took this action, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki praised it as a “positive step” while urging other social media platforms to do more. Now the House Judiciary Committee is asking Spotify to turn over any communications and judicial orders from the EU, the UK, and a host of other governments since 2020.
​
This is the right approach. We praise Chairman Jordan and his colleagues for taking their case directly to the sources of censorship. Meanwhile, as we recently pointed out, conservatives in the United States should not punish the targets of past official censorship and coercion by enacting a censorship regime of their own.

Conservatives, firmly in power, hold the whip hand over their long-standing tormentors, including those who for years privately censored their speech. The Trump administration is now exploring ways to use its regulatory power to punish Silicon Valley and social media companies for suppressing conservative voices on private platforms.

• But punishing people who refused to associate their platforms with conservative speech by using government to infringe on their speech and associational rights threatens to permanently degrade the First Amendment.

​

• Conservative regulators should also realize they are publicly toying with the very weapons that will almost certainly be used to silence them again, only in more effective ways, if another progressive president is elected.

Consider Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who is threatening to use Section 5 of the FTC Act – which outlaws unfair or deceptive practices – to target social media companies for selective enforcement of their terms of service. Chairman Ferguson also contemplates using antitrust law to “prosecute any unlawful collusion between online platforms, and confront advertiser boycotts which threaten competition among those platforms.”
 
Ferguson told an audience in March: “I’m not looking for censorship qua censorship. I’m looking for exercises of market power that might reveal themselves in censorship.”
 
Conservatives, bruised by rough treatment at the hands of big social media companies, understandably exult in this role reversal. Discrimination against conservative speech clearly happened, from Facebook’s efforts to exclude the conservative Prager University from its digital audiences, to crackdowns on posts that asserted that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China (which the FBI and CIA now believe it probably did), to efforts by secret entities within the State Department to persuade advertisers to defund conservative and libertarian publications.
​
Are consumer-protection complaints about companies’ editorial judgments, which would put the government firmly into the business of managing speech, a legitimate approach to reform? Section 5 allows the government to go after a company selling an ointment that it falsely claims prevents COVID-19 infections. That would not be a “speech” issue. It would be fraud enforcement. But should the government be able to tell a private company it must post a conservative or a progressive political statement, or be in violation of the law?
 
Labeling such editorial choices as supposed “evidence” of collusion inevitably carries the risk of government manipulation of private speech.
 
It would in fact be a violation of the First Amendment for the government to tell private actors – whether a network news organization or a social media platform – what to say or not say. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Moody v. NetChoice that social media companies have a First Amendment right to select, order, and rank third-party posts as they see fit. Prosecuting content and its moderation under unfair or deceptive trade practices would install government as a national content manager and editor-in-chief.
 
This is worse than overkill. The essential problem of content management censorship was, after all, driven primarily by government. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that he received calls from White House staffers who screamed at him about Facebook’s content decisions. The FBI had 80 agents assigned to evaluating social media posts as possible disinformation. Agencies from the IRS, to the Department of Homeland Security, to the State Department, pressured platforms on their posts. All of them have enormous regulatory power over Silicon Valley, making their “jawboning” for editorial changes far stronger than polite suggestions. Changing the jawboner to the FTC is just a new version of this regulatory game of three-card Monte.
 
The application of laws about fair trade practices and antitrust enforcement to speech would be an abusive extension of Washington’s power. It is easy to imagine this power being misused in myriad ways. Conservatives above all need to keep in mind that the weapons used now to punish their progressive opponents will surely one day be in their opponent’s hands as well.
 
The better way forward is to renounce the tools of punishment and restore respect for the First Amendment. With a few social media platforms making up so much of the nation’s townhall, social media companies should live up to a civic – even a moral – obligation to not discriminate against the right or the left. But it is ultimately up to the public to enforce such standards with what they click and what they purchase.
 
If this sounds naïve, take stock of how companies are already listening and responding to public pressure. X pioneered the freeing of moderation from government control and developed “community notes” to crowdsource fact-checking. Meta is testing this crowdsource technique for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta also got rid of its notoriously biased “fact checkers.” Google is standing up to political demands by activist-employees. Such market-driven reforms are the way to go, not speech regulation from Washington regulators.
 
Conservatives would do well to remember Marcus Aurelius, who wrote that the “best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

A report released last week by the House Judiciary Committee adds detail to our report about how the European Union’s 2022 Digital Services Act allows Europeans to control and censor Americans’ speech at home and around the world.
 
The committee subpoenaed nine major technology companies to produce communications with foreign censors around the world. Analyzing the responses, the committee gained insight into the EU’s censorship goals from its requests for social media companies to identify “misleading or deceptive content,” “disinformation, “actual or foreseeable negative effects on civil discourse and electoral processes,” “hate speech,” and (this one’s a gobsmacker) “information which is not illegal.”
 
These vague and subjective standards reflect German rules that have criminalized insults to German politicians. They also fall in line with the actions of former EU Commissioner for Internal Markets Thierry Breton who wanted to sanction X for broadcasting a live interview with Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. Social media companies – almost all of them American companies – now have their content subjected to continuous scrutiny by government-designated “trusted flaggers.”

• The committee reports: “In practice, these ‘trusted flaggers’ are uniformly pro-censorship, and in many cases, they are government-funded, meaning that these so-called ‘trusted’ flaggers are incentivized to censor speech critical of politicians or the current regime.”

The Digital Services Act threatens these American social media companies with up to 6 percent of their global revenue per violation. The law, however, offers a safe harbor for U.S. companies if they adopt the EU’s ‘codes of conduct’ on a global basis. These gentle suggestions to sign up are backed with threats as subtle as Al Capone wielding a baseball bat.

• When X dropped the Code of Conduct on Disinformation in May 2023, because it does not generally use third-party fact-checkers, the EU in October opened an investigation of X’s Community Notes program. “Now,” the committee reports, “the Commission reportedly plans to fine X more than $1 billion for non-compliance with the DSA.”

 
As European censorship filters down into American speech, defensible speech – some of it banal, some of it edgy – is effectively criminalized.

• In 2023, the French National Police sprang into action when an American sarcastically responded to a mass stabbing attack: “I certainly hope this little dust-up in #Annecy doesn’t hurt this poor Syrian asylum seeker’s chance of becoming a Frenchman.”

 

• In 2024 a Polish flagger targeted a TikTok post that simply said, “electric cars are neither ecological nor an economical solution.”

 

• In 2024 a tweet that factually noted that a Syrian family in Germany is reported to have committed 110 criminal offenses was judged by the German government to be a violation of the criminal code.

The committee’s conclusion is blunt: “Taken together, the evidence is clear: the Digital Services Act requires the world’s largest social media platform to engage in censorship of core political discourse in Europe, the United States, and around the world.”
 
With the announcement of a new trade deal between the United States and the European Union, the way should now be clear for the Trump administration to take up the EU’s censorship as the next big issue in our bilateral relations.

​It was bound to happen. Is AI-generated content “speech” for the purposes of the First Amendment? A federal district court in Florida, for now at least, says “no.”
 
The circumstances surrounding Garcia v. Character Technologies are tragic. Here’s the background.
 
Character Technologies is an AI software company that allows users to interact with anthropomorphic chatbots, whose conversational abilities are designed to mimic those of real people on traditional messaging apps. The company does this using the same technology underlying products like ChatGPT – namely, large language models. In fact, the company’s founders first developed the application while working for Google on its LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) program.
 
Character Technologies became available to the public in late 2022. Two years later, the app had been downloaded more than 10 million times.
 
One of those 10 million users was 14-year-old Sewell Setzer. Just weeks after downloading Character AI, Setzer became outright addicted, spending more and more time with the chatbot characters, including a version of Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. He withdrew from social interactions, quit his basketball team and began exhibiting signs of mental illness. Setzer’s parents eventually confiscated his phone, but as many children often do – he found it.
 
On February 28, 2025, Setzer sent the following messages:
 
Sewell: I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany.
 
Daenerys Targaryen Character: I love you too, Daenero6. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.
 
Sewell: What if I told you I could come home right now?
 
Daenerys Targaryen Character: ... please do my sweet king
 
He shot himself shortly thereafter.
 
Character Technologies sought to defend itself against the Setzer parents’ lawsuit by invoking the First Amendment. The company argued that its output constitutes speech that its users have a constitutional right to receive.
 
In an order ruling on Character Technologies’ motion to dismiss, Judge Ann Conway accepted the defendants’ argument that Character Technologies can assert the First Amendment rights of its users, noting that “Courts regularly recognize the First Amendment rights of listeners.” (see: Citizens United) But Judge Conway also rejected the argument that “words strung together by an LLM are speech.”
 
Courts have recognized film, music, video games and even social media content moderation as forms of protected speech because they are inherently expressive. Character Technologies analogizes itself to these mediums and activities. But, as Conway points out, the “Court’s decision as to the First Amendment protections Character A.I. receives, if any, does not turn on whether Character A.I. is similar to other mediums that have received First Amendment protections; rather, the decision turns on how Character A.I. is similar to the other mediums.”
 
One way it is not similar is that your average movie was scripted, acted, and directed by humans. A chatbot is programed by people, but its responsive calculations are not the result of sentience. It therefore cannot engage in “expressive” activity.
 
Extending speech rights for a coded product – devoid of any directed, active expression – is ludicrous on its face; but there’s no doubt we’ll see this sort of thinking again as AI becomes more versatile. Are the rights of people behind this technology implicated? Justice Amy Coney Barrett has already raised questions about this stance. In her Moody v. NetChoice concurrence, she asked:
 
“What if a platform’s owners hand the reins to an [A.I.] tool and ask it simply to remove ‘hateful’ content? If the [A.I.] relies on large language models to determine what is ‘hateful’ and should be removed, has a human being with First Amendment rights made an inherently expressive ‘choice . . . not to propound a particular point of view?’”
 
Courts will no doubt continue to grapple with the legal status of AI-generated content. In litigating outcomes, product creators should vigorously invoke and defend their constitutional rights. Their products probably cannot.

​In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the best remedy for “falsehood and fallacies,” besides education, “is more speech, not enforced silence.”
 
Almost a century later, enforced silence became the favored solution of government censors, from the FBI to the State Department, who secretly jawboned social media platforms to remove posts the government believed to be disinformation from Russia, misinformation, or dangerous information. As Mark Zuckerberg made clear in his recent interview with Joe Rogan, when a highly regulated industry gets angry calls demanding removal of content from the government, it is not taken as a gentle suggestion. Thus for several years threads of the national discussion were quietly pulled, with millions of social media consumers none the wiser.
 
That era is now over.
 
President Trump’s executive order forbidding censorship and the shuttering of government agencies, like the State Department’s infamous Global Engagement Center, prevent a restart of the government censorship regime, at least for the foreseeable future.
 
But the complex problems of content moderation still remain. The First Amendment restricts government control of speech, but it does not forbid social media companies from moderating the content they host. Meta says it will continue the content moderation for material that is obscene, violent, and extreme. But otherwise, the way is open for controversial speech of all sorts.
 
How, then, will assertions be vetted? Not by third-party fact-checkers. That model, too, is broken. Zuckerberg agreed that the fact-checking process was subjective and often warped by partisan bias. The way forward for Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, then, is to promote more speech, by allowing the public to test ideas. Meta is doing this with the incorporation of the same open-source algorithm that powers X’s community notes. That technology is now being tested by Meta across the country, with 200,000 people already signed up to become Community Notes contributors.
 
Crowd-sourced factchecking will undoubtedly be imperfect. Social media platforms will have to be on guard for organized efforts to game the new system. But overall, Community Notes is the superior solution. It follows speech with more speech – and then leaves it up to us to decide what is fair and true, just as we do all the time at the American dinner table.

​Congress is once again attempting to keep children off of social media. It’s a noble and well-intended effort – but it also implicates the First Amendment in ways that deserve more scrutiny in Congressional debate.
 
The bill, dubbed the “Kids Off Social Media Act,” is a bipartisan effort spearheaded by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). According to a press release on Sen. Schatz’ website, the legislation would ban social media accounts for children under 13 and prohibit algorithmic recommendations to users under the age of 17.
 
A large body of research implicates social media as harmful to child development. Sen. Schatz himself cites an alarming study showing that social media is a leading driver of poor mental health among youth. According to the CDC, 57 percent of high school girls and 29 percent of high school boys felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. This social despondency is often attributed to sites like Instagram that proliferate unattainable standards for children in looks, wealth, and travel.
 
As parents ourselves, we do not underestimate the risks social media can pose to children. At the same time, we cannot ignore that children have free speech rights, too. Some digital rights activists have also expressed concern that implementing new rules around social media would cause platforms to collect even more data from consumers. The Open Technology Institute demonstrates that such a law could make it necessary to engage in “the installation and use of AI-powered spyware to surveil students’ online activities during and outside of school hours.”
 
We advise Congress to move with great deliberation in considering this bill – and others like it – to ensure that Congress fully considers its secondary effects like the law’s potential to promote AI surveillance of students. There are few serious problems in America that cannot be made worse by an overly ambitious law and regulatory regime. It’s one thing to want to keep our kids happy and healthy – it’s another to prescribe broad fixes with insufficient detail and safeguards. Members of Congress should think hard about the implications inherent in any bill regulating the speech rights of Americans.
 
Perhaps this debate might spur social media companies to preempt legislation by taking serious steps to address the multitude of problems children face on social media. If social media companies were to create safer, more kid-friendly spaces, Congress may not need to act at all.

​Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mark Zuckerberg was a bro-fest, complete with discussions of the joys of hunting, Nordic curls, and ju-jitsu. The CEO of Meta also recounted how he got boiled by degrees in giving in to the demands of government agencies and the Biden Administration in censoring content.
 
“They pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true. Right? I mean they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take them down. And I was like, we’re not gonna do that …”
 
Zuckerberg pointed to the voluminous report by Chairman Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee documenting the government’s efforts to manipulate content. The committee’s analysis and the government’s documents show the reality of government “jawboning” on social media.
 
“I mean basically these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said. “They want[ed] us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how 10 years from now or something, you know, we’re going to see an ad that says, okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible … for this kind of payment, like, some sort of like class action lawsuit type meme. And they’re like, ‘no. You have to take that down.’ We’re not gonna take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are true.”
 
When Meta resisted some of the persistent demands of the government to remove content, Zuckerberg notes that President Biden in a 2021 press conference accused social media companies of “killing people.” The Federal Trade Commission launched antitrust lawsuits and investigations against Facebook and a number of other big social media outlets. Zuckerberg said, “all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. And it was brutal.”
 
Any suggestion that jawboning by officials at the White House and in the agencies was purely a matter of advice should be laid to rest by the Judiciary Committee’s analysis and postings, as well as Zuckerberg’s description of being on the receiving end of this treatment. As Zuckerberg said, “you can’t censor that if it’s real legitimate information because it’s not ideologically convenient for you.”

​On Jan. 10 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in TikTok v. Garland to decide whether the First Amendment requires the Court to block the law requiring the social media platform to undergo a forced sale by its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or be shuttered.
 
Many civil liberties organizations have come to TikTok’s defense in recent months, making the point that if the government can silence one social media platform, it can close any media outlet, newspaper, website, or TV channel. And they are right that forcing a private media company to sell or go out of business is a drastic action usually associated with authoritarian rule.
 
President-elect Trump filed an amicus brief with the Court asking the Justices to stay the legislative deadline that falls on Jan. 19, one day before his inauguration. The incoming president wants to be free to negotiate a solution for TikTok that will not require the blunderbuss of a forced sale or closure. His brief seeks “a negotiated resolution that could prevent a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, thus preserving the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans, while also addressing the government’s security concerns.”
 
The president-elect’s brief also contained a nod to the real danger in TikTok’s accumulation of the personal data of its 170 million American users, including 67 percent of U.S. teens. A year-long, bipartisan investigation in the House concluded that TikTok is being used by Beijing to spy on American citizens. The Senate agreed by voting for a bipartisan aid bill that included the “ban-or-sale” measure.
 
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the law as constitutional, concluding that the measure satisfied strict scrutiny due to the national security necessity of preventing China from secretly collecting the data of United States citizens (and covertly manipulating content, too). As one TikTok official said in a leaked communication, “Everything is seen by China.”
 
As we reported, TikTok also surveils journalists like Emily Baker-White from Forbes. Want a good way to chill speech in America? How about permitting an adversarial nation to spy on reporters and their sources? 
 
With such facts in mind, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who wrote for the court, declared that the law does not violate the speech rights of users. Nor does it necessarily even curb disfavored speech. Judge Ginsburg wrote:
 
“Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much [People’s Republic of China] propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing.”
 
In short, the lower court has held that the First Amendment should not apply to the corporate subsidiary of a hostile foreign adversary. The D.C. Circuit suggests that since the measure is the narrowly tailored result of considered legislative processes in furtherance of a compelling government interest, it can be allowed.

The court understands that the government could never ban a media outlet for its content. But could it ban an online website that distributes foreign spyware on the computers of its readers? That’s not so far off from what so many have concluded is happening here. Yet forcing the sale or closure of a media outlet is an extreme measure for any democracy to take.
 
The Court will have much to consider. Stay tuned.

​On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit delivered a stinging rebuke to those who believe social media companies should be treated as common carriers. One of those true believers is Tim Wu, former Biden administration advisor and widely regarded as a thought leader of progressive policy. Wu wrote:
 
“Since its activation, the First Amendment has presupposed an information-poor world, and it focuses near-exclusively on the protection of speakers from government, as if they were rare and delicate butterflies threatened by one terrible monster.”
 
Wu’s quote, in which the monster is the government, comes from a 2018 Michigan Law Review piece entitled “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” In The New York Times more recently, Wu protests that “liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly everything that can be called ‘speech,’ regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”
 
The implication here, of course, is that we need smart regulators who can spot the difference between speech that has value, and that which should be discarded. Wu also seems to suggest that corporations – collections of humans that can range from ExxonMobil to the ACLU – shouldn’t have First Amendment rights at all.
 
More than anything, Wu’s conceit is that we should live under a noocracy (rule by the supposed wise, as attested to by their Ivy League degrees). Wu advocates reducing large social media companies to common carrier status, to be regulated by the government.
 
This is all relevant today because it was Wu who coined the term “net neutrality,” a set of rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission to force all internet service providers to give all content in their pipeline the same priority. The Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati bought none of this when it struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules.
 
The court’s reasoning was prosaic. Under Loper Bright, a recent Supreme Court opinion that limits (Chevron) deference to government agencies, such sweeping rule-making by the FCC would require authorization by Congress. Transforming social media companies into common carriers to be regulated like railroads or airlines is an act that must be rooted in a statute. Congress has passed no law authorizing common carrier status for social media companies or net neutrality.
 
But issues of grand principle were also protected by the Sixth Circuit. First, the court protected the financial model that incentivizes investors to fund companies like Verizon or Comcast to build out and maintain the national networks of fiber optic cable. Without this incentive, there would be no internet to regulate.
 
Second, and most important, if internet companies become common carriers, then the way in which they handle content can also be regulated. The FCC’s rules would have put speech itself in the hands of regulators. And then the one terrible monster truly would be destroying the butterflies.
 
Protect The 1st salutes the Sixth Circuit for a wise decision that protects speech from those who believe they know which speakers have “value” and which ones don’t.

​President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission promises he will “smash the censorship cartel.” A current FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr is a seasoned policymaker and scholar of communication law. He is an unabashed promoter of the free market, promising to reduce regulation and “refill America’s spectrum pipeline” to “unleash economic prosperity.”
 
Carr authored the FCC section of Project 2025, which encapsulates what the FCC’s policy efforts are likely to encompass in the coming years. Relevant to the First Amendment is Carr’s approach to Section 230. This is the law that grants social media companies immunity from liability for content produced by third parties, while acknowledging the companies’ right to moderate their sites.
 
Carr believes Section 230 has been expanded and abused to censor conservative and other speech, concluding it “is hard to imagine another industry in which a greater gap exists between power and accountability.” That’s why, in his view, the “FCC should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.”
 
Specifically, Carr suggests that the “FCC can clarify that Section 230(c)(1) does not apply broadly to every decision that a platform makes. Rather its protections apply only when a platform does not remove information provided by someone else. In contrast, the FCC should clarify that the more limited Section 230(c)(2) protections apply to any covered platform’s decision to restrict access to material provided by someone else.”
 
What this means, in effect, will be much less immunity for platforms under Section 230(c)(1), broadly interpreted by courts to apply to both distribution and takedown decisions – even though Section 230(c)(2) speaks more directly to the latter. Carr’s proposal is a direct shot at the kind of censorship decisions that have so enflamed conservative circles in recent years, and it means platforms could have substantially less legal protection in such future cases. At the same time, basic publishing and editorial functions (even a hands-off editorial approach), as well as removal of lewd or violent material would likely remain covered under this framework. (For more on the distinction between Section 230(c)(1) and Section 230(c)(2)), we recommend this Congressional Research Service report.)
 
Carr’s writings make frequent appeals to Congress to reform and update the laws governing the internet, eager to work with Congress to harmonize his regulatory approach with the law. Given the role of courts in interpreting rules against the statutes they are based upon, it is hard, however, to predict what this new framework will look like.
 
There’s certainly a scenario where litigation against tech platforms could snowball in a way that harms innovation, consumer experience, and the overall speech climate. Moreover, the First Amendment upholds the right of social media companies to moderate their content. Courts should not allow any rule that compromises their rights. Still, Carr’s effort to carve out more respect for speech by reinterpreting Section 230 is a lighter touch than many legislative proposals.
 
Carr suggests placing transparency rules on big social media platforms – specifically, requiring “platforms to provide greater specificity regarding their terms of service.” We would prefer social media companies to voluntarily take up these rules. Platforms’ moderation decisions should take place in the open, providing clarity to consumers and furthering free expression and association on the handful of sites that have become the nation’s townhall.
 
Carr also advocates for returning “to Internet users the power to control their online experiences,” perhaps through choosing “their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.” At the same time, he concedes that such policies could be seen by some as intruding “on the First Amendment rights of corporations to exclude content from their private platforms.” Carr should heed his reservation. Protect The 1st wholeheartedly supports the speech rights of private companies and opposes external impositions on this fundamental right.
 
Regarding national security, Carr wholeheartedly supports a ban on TikTok, espousing that it provides “Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.” We support the law that requires divestment by China’s ByteDance. With a sale to a U.S. owner, there would be no need for a blanket ban on TikTok that infringes on the speech and associational rights of Americans.
 
Lastly, Carr seeks to re-emphasize the establishment of wireless connectivity for all Americans by freeing up more spectrum and streamlining the permitting process for wireless builds. According to the FCC, 24 million Americans still lack high-speed Internet as of 2024, and that’s 24 million Americans who are less able to exercise their speech rights than their fellow countrymen.
 
Overall, Carr’s focus is to modernize the FCC and promote prosperity by turning to a “pro-growth agenda” over the heavy hand of regulatory decree. “The FCC is a New Deal-era agency,” Carr writes. “Its history of regulation tends to reflect the view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes.”
 
In short, Brendan Carr promises to be a bold leader at the FCC who aims to break policy logjams. Protect The 1st looks forward to evaluating his proposals when they are fleshed out in January.

​Protect The 1st filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which a public school teacher was terminated over a search of her old retweets of social media memes. While a seemingly small case, it could have outsized influence over the speech rights of millions of Americans.
 
The case involves a public schoolteacher, Kari MacRae, who was hired by the Hanover High School in 2021. Months before, MacRae had been a candidate for the local school board in this Massachusetts town. At that time, she had shared and liked on her TikTok account several memes and videos poking fun at “woke” ideology. (You can decide for yourself what you think of MacRae’s reposted memes, highlighted in this Boston.com article.)
 
Hanover High learned of the unearthing of MacRae’s old TikTok reposts from local media. It then placed MacRae on administrative leave to conduct a 14-day investigation. The school then fired her.
 
MacRae sued for wrongful termination and the violation of her rights only to lose in federal district court and then on appeal before the U.S. First Circuit. In our view, the First Circuit misapplied a framework that if not reviewed and overturned by the Supreme Court, will leave the speech rights of government employees – 15 percent of the U.S. workforce – at risk.
 
The Supreme Court has already held in Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) that when government “employees are speaking as citizens about matters of public concern,” they “must face only those speech restrictions that are necessary for their employers to operate efficiently and effectively.” The First Circuit instead embraced a “balancing” standard between personal rights and public responsibilities.
 
Protect The 1st responds: “Framed in Garcetti’s terms, this case asks whether government employers, to ‘operate efficiently and effectively,’ must have carte blanche to punish their employees not for what they are now saying, but for anything they have ever said – even before they were hired. If the First Amendment means anything in this context, the answer to that question must be no. An alternative holding would silence prospective government employees lest their speech, whenever it was made, could later be cited as a reason to destroy their careers.”
 
We warn that if the First Circuit’s standard were adopted broadly, “fully protected speech could lose its protection with time – an untenable proposition.” Protect the 1st also told the Court:
 
“… that in a world where many people spend their lives online, a rule that anything they say there can later be the impetus for their termination from government employment would impose an unconscionable burden on the right to speak on issues of public concern: It would chill pre-employment speech at the front end and give a modified heckler’s veto to bad actors at the back end.”
 
We urge the Supreme Court, which has taken up few First Amendment cases so far in this term, to grant the petition and reverse the First Circuit’s erroneous ruling.

​The nation’s two presidential candidates sometimes seem at a loss to understand or appreciate the First Amendment, which protects religious expression and freedom of the press, among other forms of speech.
 
Case in point: when Vice President Kamala Harris was asked this week in an NBC interview if she would support a religious exemption for physicians on abortion, she flatly rejected any such “concession.” The Democratic nominee for president spoke about the “basic freedom” of a woman to control her own body, while rejecting the idea that a physician in a white surgical gown should have control over the actions of his or her own hands.
 
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about – the Harris position would pull the medical licenses of men and women of faith for declining to personally perform abortions. Never mind that this country has no lack of physicians willing to perform that procedure.
 
Contrast the vice president’s stance with the Democrats of New Mexico, where last year Gov. Michelle Lujan and her fellow Democrats in the legislature took a commendable step to improve a law they championed to make sure it observes the religious freedom of physicians. That law is the Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life Options Act, which went into effect in 2021. The law required doctors who objected to administering fatal drugs to a patient to refer them to a physician who would. Gov. Lujan and her allies in the New Mexico legislature heard the outcry from physicians of faith and responded with courage to correct their law to observe the religious freedom of expression.
 
Why can’t Harris follow that example?
 
Then there is former President Trump, who has been littering the airwaves with threats to pull the broadcast licenses of ABC and then CBS for disputes over their fact checks and editorial decisions. News flash: Networks don’t have broadcast licenses. Their local affiliates do. News organizations don’t need a “license” to practice journalism. Anyone can do it. Again, it’s called the First Amendment.
 
Contrast the Republican nominee’s frequent threats with those of his Republican predecessors. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush complained about media bias, but each of them found artful ways to counter it. The first President Bush forcefully rejected the contentions of CBS’s Dan Rather on air, then the allies of the second President Bush discredited him so badly that Rather eventually resigned from CBS. The presidential father and son did so by exercising their First Amendment rights, without resorting to threats of censorship.
 
Yet listening to our candidates today, we have to ask: is rubbishing the First Amendment the new normal in American presidential politics? At the very least, the current state of the presidential debate points to the urgency of restoring civics education that imparts a classical understanding of our Constitution.

​California holds the unique position of being both the most innovative state in the union and perhaps the most ignominious when it comes to government overreach. Take a recent law that passed the California State Legislature back in September: AB 2839, which targets election misinformation, and which is now enjoined pursuant to a federal court order.
 
AB 2839 takes aim at “materially deceptive” communications distributed within 120 days of an election and up to 60 days after one. Specifically, the law states that “[a] person, committee, or other entity shall not…with malice, knowingly distribute an advertisement or other election communication containing materially deceptive content” of a candidate “portrayed as doing or saying something the candidate did not do or say if the content is reasonably likely to harm the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.” The law permits any recipient of the content to file suit against the content creator.
 
In an era in which many voters hold legitimate concerns about AI, deepfakes, bots, and other methods of digital manipulation, the impulse to use whatever means necessary to protect election integrity is not entirely misguided. AB 2839 goes way too far.
 
Like many such laws, AB 2839 “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content-based law requires under strict scrutiny.” Its broad sweep, writes Judge John Mendez, “does much more than punish potential defamatory statements since the statute does not require actual harm and sanctions any digitally manipulated content that is ‘reasonably likely’ to ‘harm’ the amorphous ‘electoral prospects’ of a candidate or elected official.” For instance, as written, the law could subject the creator of any candidate deepfake to civil liability – even if it “does not implicate reputational harm.” 
 
As Mendez points out, New York Times v. Sullivan long ago addressed the issue of deliberate lies about the government, which are constitutionally protected. To the extent speech conduct targets public figures or private individuals, remedies like “privacy torts, copyright infringement, or defamation” already exist. As such, it is entirely unnecessary to separately target speech occurring within an electoral context, which is “a content-based regulation that seeks to limit public discourse.” Beyond the legal implications, it practically opens the floodgates to all manner of politically motivated censorship.
 
Parody is perhaps the most likely victim of AB 2839’s reach. The plaintiff, Christopher Kohls, runs a YouTube channel steeped in political satire. And, while the law does contain a carveout exempting such content, it requires a written disclaimer "no smaller than the largest font size of other text appearing in the visual media." In other words, it would render Kohls’ content unwatchable.
 
Judge Mendez writes, “Supreme Court precedent illuminates that while a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment. YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and X tweets are the newspaper advertisements and political cartoons of today, and the First Amendment protects and individual’s right to speak regardless of the new medium these critiques may take.”
 
We’ll be watching this case closely should the Golden State decide to appeal.

​An important analysis from Real Clear Investigations probes the extent to which censorship abroad threatens the First Amendment here at home. 
 
Writer Ben Weingarten asks whether foreign demands that domestic media companies operating abroad comply with those nations’ often far more censorial legal requirements will lead in turn to more censorship here at home. The preponderance of the evidence suggests bad news for fans of the First Amendment.
 
Weingarten points specifically to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which imposes content moderation standards that far exceed what would be considered constitutional in the United States. For example, companies doing business in the EU must combat “illegal content online,” which includes the disfavored rhetoric like “illegal hate speech.”
 
Writes Weingarten:
 
“Platforms also must take ‘risk-based action,’ including undergoing independent audits to combat ‘disinformation or election manipulation’ – with the expectation those measures should be taken in consultation with ‘independent experts and civil society organisations.’ The Commission says these measures are aimed at mitigating ‘systemic issues such as … hoaxes and manipulation during pandemics, harms to vulnerable groups and other emerging societal harms’ driven by ‘harmful’ but not illegal content.”
 
What’s more, investigations pursuant to the DSA can result in fines of up to 6% of annual global revenue, a potential outcome likely to give companies like X and Facebook pause when considering whether to comply with the invasive oversight of European bureaucrats and NGOs serving as arbiters of the appropriate.
 
Then there’s the question of whether social media companies that agree to the EU’s demands are likely to run parallel services – for example, a DSA compliant version of X and another that is consistent with the requirements of the First Amendment.
 
Elon Musk seemed willing to abandon Brazil after that country banned X for failing to de-platform the account of former president Jair Bolsonaro. (Though Musk’s company is now very much back in business there.) But the EU is a much bigger market with a lot more monetizable users.
 
As Weingarten documents, the punishment of media companies abroad for speech that is well within the bounds of the First Amendment is a growing trend – not just in the EU but also in countries like the UK and Australia. And Weingarten reserves no small amount of criticism for the Biden Administration’s silence – and even capitulation – in the face of such foreign censorship.
 
Bills like the No Censors on our Shores Act, which could “punish foreign individuals and entities that promote or engage in the censorship of American speech,” offer one potential solution to foreign censorship creep. So do articles like Weingarten’s, which provide a much-needed diagnosis of our speech-related ailings and failings.

​Former senator and presidential candidate John Kerry said the quiet part out loud in recent comments before the World Economic Forum.
 
In answer to a question regarding critics of climate change, Kerry responded vigorously, saying:
 
“You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etcetera. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”
 
We at Protect the 1st are no critics of the climate change debate, which is important. But we cast a critical eye at those who would minimize First Amendment protections to silence their opposition. 
 
Kerry said, "Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are."
 
With all respect to Kerry, we’re a hard pass on a Ministry of Truth. The free exchange of ideas, even bad ideas, is essential for an informed discourse.

​The recent wave of government actions against social media platforms — from Brazil’s suspension of X to France’s charges against Telegram’s CEO — reveals a downward global trend in official respect for free speech in the digital age. Framed as efforts to protect public safety, national security, or the democratic process, governments around the world are increasingly bold in controlling what can be said and who can speak online.
 
While some actions target harmful content, many governments (including, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attests, our own) risk outright censorship that stifles dissent and restricts access to information.
 
Exhibit A is Brazil, in which the Supreme Court, led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, ordered a nationwide block on X, formerly Twitter, after the platform refused to appoint a legal representative in the country. This decision follows confrontations over X’s refusal to remove content and block accounts linked to “disinformation” and “extremism” – even though some of the blocked accounts are those of a Brazilian senator and prominent critics of the current administration. X’s Elon Musk understandably is concerned that such “regulation” could be used to censor dissent and control public discourse. So he refused to appoint a legal representative who almost surely would be arrested and prosecuted.
 
Justice de Moraes frames his efforts as a battle against misinformation, citing X's failure to comply with directives as evidence of its disregard for Brazilian law. But Elon Musk, a "free speech absolutist," correctly portrays these actions as overreach by an authoritarian judge.
 
France recently charged Telegram CEO Pavel Durov with failing to prevent illicit activities on his platform. Some argue that pressure from the U.S. Congress and Biden Administration for TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company is also censorship, though many (Protect The 1st included) have concerns about TikTok’s threats to the data privacy of 170 million Americans and national security.
 
What is clear is that governments are more aggressively regulating platforms they see as threats to public order or sovereignty. Each presents a mix of justifications and overreach. Brazil's crackdown on X is seen by some as necessary to safeguard democracy, while others view it as an overreaction that threatens rights. France’s prosecution of Durov is an overreach if it criminalizes encryption and undermines privacy. Concerns over the data practices of TikTok, its parent ByteDance, and the Chinese government are legitimate, while cracking down on perceived “Chinese-friendly” content would be a clear First Amendment issue.
 
It is true that social media platforms wield considerable power to shape public discourse and influence the conduct of elections; however, methods to counter these threats risk stifling dissent, restricting information, and setting dangerous precedents for censorship. For example, targeting Starlink, Musk's satellite internet provider, for X’s fines seems excessive. Similarly, arresting Durov risks conflating the platform with the actions of Telegram’s users.
 
Is there a better path? Regulators should focus on transparency, accountability, and due process rather than outright bans. Overregulation risks losing a vibrant, open digital space where even controversial ideas can be freely exchanged. If not carefully calibrated, efforts to protect will become efforts to suppress.
 
It won’t be easy, but democratic governments must both defend against illegal content and protect principles of free speech and the robust sharing of information – even when that information is deemed to be wrong.

​Earlier we compared the First Amendment records of Sen. J.D. Vance and Gov. Tim Walz, finding the two vice presidential candidates problematic with notable bright spots.
 
So how do the two candidates at the top of the ticket compare on defending speech? Answer: Even more problematic, but also with some bright spots.
 
Vice President Kamala Harris
 
As a U.S. Senator, Harris in 2017 co-sponsored an amendment with her fellow Californian and leading Democrat, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that would have required federal agencies to obtain a probable cause warrant before the FISA Court could allow the government to review the contents of Americans’ emails. Protecting Americans from warrantless surveillance of their private communications concerning personal, political, and religious lives is one of the best ways to protect speech.
 
As a senator, Harris also defended the First Amendment rights of social media platforms to moderate their content. This is not surprising given that she was from California and big tech is one of her best backers. The Washington Post reports that Karen Dunn, one of Google’s top attorneys in against the Biden administration’s antitrust case, is a top Harris advisor. This closeness suggests a danger that a Harris administration might lean heavily in support of using friendly relations with big tech as a backdoor way to censor critics and conservative speech.
 
Consider that Harris once called for the cancellation of former President Donald Trump’s then-Twitter account, saying:
 
“And the bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power … They are speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.”
 
Why does it have to stop? Americans have spoken for two centuries without any level of oversight or regulation. You might find the speech of many to be vile, unhinged, hateful, or radical. But unless it calls for violence, or is obscene, it is protected by the First Amendment. When, exactly, did liberals lose their faith in the American people and replace it with a new faith in the regulation of speech?
 
Worse, as California Attorney General, Harris got the ball rolling on trying to force nonprofits to turn over their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B, which would have given her office the identities of donors.
 
Under Harris’s successor, this case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Protect The 1st was proud to submit an amicus brief, joined with amici from a coalition of groups from across the ideological spectrum. We demonstrated that the likely exposure of donors’ identities would result in various forms of “cancellation,” from firings and the destruction of businesses, to actual physical threats. A Supreme Court majority agreed with us in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021 that the same principle that defended Alabama donors to the NAACP extends to all nonprofits.
 
The Biden-Harris administration has also been mum on worldwide crackdowns on speech, from a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice’s cancellation of X, to hints from the French government that this U.S.-based platform might be the next target after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
 
Former President Donald Trump
 
This is a harder one to judge. It’s long been said that Donald Trump wears better if you turn the sound off.
 
On the plus side, President Trump took a notably strong approach in supporting surveillance reform. A victim himself of illicit surveillance justified by the FBI before the FISA Court with a doctored political dossier and a forged document, President Trump was sensitive to the First Amendment implications of an overweening surveillance state. To his credit, he nixed the reauthorization of one surveillance authority – Section 215, or the so-called “business records provision.”
 
During the pandemic, Trump issued guidance in defense of religious liberty. He said: “Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics essential but have left out churches and houses of worship. It’s not right. So I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential.” He backed up his defense of religious liberty by appointing three Supreme Court Justices – Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh – who have been strong defenders of religious liberty.
 
But turn the sound back on and you will hear Donald Trump call the American press “the enemy of the people.” Call the media biased, corrupt, in the bag for the Democrats, whatever you like … but “enemy of the people?” Trump’s rhetoric on the media often edges toward physical hostility. As president, he mocked a CNN reporter who was hit with a rubber bullet while covering the 2020 riots in Minneapolis. “Remember that beautiful sight?” Trump asked.
 
At a time when journalists are under threat in America and around the world, this is a decidedly un-American way to confront media bias.
 
Donald Trump has also called for a loosening of the libel laws to allow elected officials to more easily pursue claims against journalists without having to meet the Supreme Court’s “actual malice” standard. We agree that there is room for sharpening libel law in the age of social media amplification, but allowing wealthy politicians to sue news outlets out of business would be one effective way to gut the First Amendment.
 
So what should we conclude? Both Harris and Trump have mixed records. Both have taken bold stands for speech. Both have treated the opposition as so evil that they do not deserve legal protections. Both seem capable of surprising us, either by being more prone to censorship or to taking bold stands for free speech.
 
Whatever your political leanings, urge your candidate and your party to lean on the side of the First Amendment.

​We’ve already heard a lot of rowdy speech from the two vice-presidential candidates, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance. Would they be as generous in applying the First Amendment to others as they do to themselves?
 
Tim Walz, who, despite correct opinions regarding the tragedy of Warren Zevon being left out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hasn’t been as on the money when it comes to which types of speech are protected and which are not. In 2022, Walz said on MSNBC:
 
“There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tell the truth, where the voting places are, who can vote, who's able to be there….”
 
As PT1st senior legal advisor Eugene Volokh points out in Reason: “Walz was quite wrong in saying that ‘There's no guarantee to free speech’ as to ‘hate speech.’ The Supreme Court has made clear that there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment (and see here for more details). The First Amendment generally protects the views that the government would label ‘hateful’ as much as it protects other views.”
 
Legal treatment of misinformation is more complicated. In United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court held that lies “about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and the like” are largely constitutionally protected. Libel, generally, is not – though, in a defamation case, a public official can only succeed in their claim if they can show that a false statement was published with “actual malice” – in other words, “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Categories of intentional misinformation that are patently not protected include lying to government investigators and fraudulent charitable fundraising.
 
Walz may be on firmer ground when it comes to lies about the mechanics of voting – when, where, and how to vote. Thirteen states already ban such statements. As Volokh writes, “[I]f limited to the context that Walz seemed to have been describing – in the Court's words, ‘messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures’ – Walz may well be correct.”
 
On freedom of religion, Walz’s record as governor is concerning. During the pandemic lockdowns, the governor imposed particularly harsh restrictions on religious gatherings, limiting places of worship to a maximum of ten congregants, while allowing retailers to open up at 50 percent capacity. An ensuing lawsuit, which Walz lost, resulted in an agreement granting religious institutions parity with secular businesses.
 
Walz also signed a law prohibiting colleges and universities that require a statement of faith from participating in a state program allowing high school students to earn college credits. As the bill’s sponsor conceded, the legislation was intended in part to coerce religious educational institutions into admitting students regardless of their beliefs – diluting their freedom of association. That controversy is currently being litigated in court. Little wonder the Catholic League declared that “Tim Walz is no friend of religious liberty.”
 
The Knights of Columbus might agree – at least as pertains to the broader ticket. In 2018, during the federal judicial nomination hearing for Brian Buescher, then-Sen. Kamala Harris criticized the organization for its “extremist” (read: traditional) views on social issues. Harris also sponsored the “Do No Harm” Act, which would have required health care workers to perform abortions in violation of their religious beliefs. 
 
Regarding Vance, the former Silicon Valley investor is hostile to the speech rights of private tech companies (who certainly enjoy the same First Amendment protections as any other person or group). In March, the senator filed an amicus brief in support of the State of Ohio’s lawsuit against Google, which seeks to regulate the company as a common carrier. In his brief, Vance argues Google’s claim that it creates bespoke, curated search results that directly conflict with its past claims of neutrality. Sen. Vance writes:
 
“[Google’s] functions are essentially the same as any communications network: it connects people by transmitting their words and exchanging their messages. It functions just like an old telephone switchboard, but rather than connect people with cables and electromagnetic circuits, Google uses indices created through data analysis. As such, common carrier regulation is appropriate under Ohio law.”
 
Vance’s argument creeps in the direction of Texas and Florida laws that seek to regulate social media companies’ internal curation policies. Both laws were found wanting by the Supreme Court. The Court in a strongly worded remand on both laws wrote:
 
“[I]t is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression – to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks is biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.”
 
Yet Vance also attempts to “un-bias” social media platforms, leaving little to no room for independent curatorial judgment.

On the plus side, Vance has cosponsored numerous bills aimed at curtailing government censorship, including the “Free Speech Protection Act,” which prohibits government officials from “directing online platforms to censor any speech that is protected by the First Amendment.” He also sponsored the PRESERVE Online Speech Act, which would force social media companies to disclose government communications urging the censoring or deplatforming of users.
 
As the election season progresses, we can hope for more clarity on the candidates’ positions regarding our First Amendment freedoms. It is already clear, however, that both candidates are far from purists when it comes to protecting other people’s speech.

​The European Union’s Digital Services Act is an object lesson in how laws that purport to prevent the spread of “misinformation” and “disinformation” are destined to turn regulators into little tyrants.
 
Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, is threatening Elon Musk and his social media company X with legal consequences if he airs his interview with former President Donald Trump. In a letter to Musk, Breton wrote that X must see to it that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.”
 
In other words – don’t let Europeans hear the unfiltered words of a former U.S. president and major party nominee, or the EU will sanction your business.
 
This is so breathtakingly – unselfconsciously – Orwellian that it almost reads as parody.
 
Yes, much of what Donald Trump says – about the size of the crowds being drawn by his opponent, Vice President Harris, suggesting that AI was used to make them seem larger – could be fairly characterized as misinformation or disinformation. Or just plain silly. The so-called “missile gap” that dominated the U.S. election in 1960 was also patently untrue. Today, claims made by the vice president that the U.S.-Mexico border is closed and secure could be characterized in the same light. So undoubtedly could statements made by French President Emmanuel Macron or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Indeed, politicians of all political stripes and national origins stretch or distort the facts so regularly that fact-checking politicians (and, in turn, the fact-checkers) has become an ever-increasing part of journalism and an important part of the public debate.
 
It must not become the business of regulators to make their own determination of what is true or not true in a political campaign and then censor statements made by candidates. We cannot allow government to cut up democratic debate into little sanitized snippets where bureaucrats and politicians in positions of power get to create their own narrative and punish anyone who strays from the orthodoxy.
 
Let Thierry Breton be a lesson to all the scolds in this country who want to give Washington similar powers. They would rob the voters of their ability to make up their own minds and substitute a sanitized, government-approved narrative that the public could challenge only at its peril. That would be a truly “detrimental effect on civil discourse.”