Free Speech

CNN: Scottish comedian’s Nazi salute dog video was awful. But it wasn’t a crime

By Marc Randazza

Despite hearing from Meechan that the video was merely a joke, and he had no intent to offend anyone (aside from his poor girlfriend), he was found guilty of “being grossly offensive,” which is a violation of Section 127 of the UK Communications Act, which prohibits “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing” electronic communications…

Because his actions “caused offense,” he now faces up to six months in prison…

Could the United States descend into such madness? Not under the First Amendment, as I interpret it. However, this kind of craziness does not collectively spread over society all at once — it comes to us incrementally. And, we are moving in the wrong direction — if you think less freedom is the “wrong direction.” …

You might say “so what?” You might think that “offensive” speech is of low value, so who wanted it anyway? However, if you don’t believe in protecting “offensive” speech, you don’t believe in protecting speech at all. What you deem “offensive” could be “humorous” to someone else. And what you find valuable, can very easily wind up on someone else’s “offensive” list.

With our growing tolerance for intolerance, I fear, UK-style prosecutions may be on the horizon for us.

Congress

The Hill: Congress to require FEC report on foreign money in elections

By Megan R. Wilson

Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, authored the FEC language, calling it a “good step forward” toward understanding foreign influence in American elections.

“Up until now, this has been a talking point for too many people and this is a step toward action,” Kilmer told The Hill. “The Federal Election Commission is meant to be the referee to blow the whistle.”

The provision directs the FEC’s chairwoman, Republican Caroline Hunter, to submit a report to the House and Senate appropriations panels “on the Commission’s role in enforcing this prohibition, including how it identifies foreign contributions to elections, and what it plans to do in the future to continue these efforts.” …

“Preserving the integrity of elections, and protecting them from undue foreign influence, is an important function of government at all levels,” the language in the budget report reads. “Federal law, for example, prohibits foreign campaign contributions and expenditures.”

Hunter told The Hill on Thursday she looks forward to writing the report “to explain what it is we do to make sure that foreigners aren’t contributing to campaigns.”

ABC News: House Intelligence Committee votes to release GOP report finding no evidence of collusion

By Benjamin Siegel

The House Intelligence Committee voted Thursday along party lines to release the Republican majority’s report on its Russia investigation, which found no evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Republican-authored report, the first to be released from any congressional committee conducting a Russia investigation, now heads to the intelligence community for declassification, a process that could take weeks…

Democrats, who will submit their own minority rebuttal for release alongside the GOP-authored report, argue that Republicans prematurely shut down the investigation under political pressure, and refused to follow important and unresolved leads…

While Democrats did not sign on to the report, some of its findings appear to be in line with sentiments the minority has previously expressed – including the conclusion that the Executive Branch’s post-election response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election was “insufficient.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation: How Congress Censored the Internet

By Elliot Harmon

SESTA/FOSTA undermines Section 230, the most important law protecting free speech online. Section 230 protects online platforms from liability for some types of speech by their users. Without Section 230, the Internet would look very different. It’s likely that many of today’s online platforms would never have formed or received the investment they needed to grow and scale-the risk of litigation would have simply been too high. Similarly, in absence of Section 230 protections, noncommercial platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive likely wouldn’t have been founded given the high level of legal risk involved with hosting third-party content.

Importantly, Section 230 does not shield platforms from liability under federal criminal law. Section 230 also doesn’t shield platforms across-the-board from liability under civil law: courts have allowed civil claims against online platforms when a platform directly contributed to unlawful speech…

It’s easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion-and what sorts of users-they allow, censoring innocent people in the process…

Even the Department of Justice wrote a letter urging Congress not to go forward with the hybrid bill.

Internet Speech Regulation 

Competitive Enterprise Institute: Next Steps in Facebook Privacy Fallout

By Clyde Wayne Crews

This is not necessarily or automatically a public policy question, but rather a business-practices question that companies are already reacting to by reexamining existing policies and contractual relationships. Fraud and breach of contract are, after all, already illegal.

I’ve also been hearing pundits referring to the “weaponization” of social media in recent days (Oregon’s Sen. Ron Wyden used the term in a letter recently to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg). Policymakers must be careful with such fast and loose military-style language. It won’t help anyone to apply such a term to practices that are merely annoying, politically unpopular, or a private violation of contract. When and if a real threat to civil liberties emerges from the private social media data ecosystem, we need to be able to identify it clearly. That will need to be a different debate than the one politicians likely have the appetite to discuss, because if policymakers intend to say free speech or persuasion (even “fake” persuasion) is being weaponized, and something needs to be done about it, then what they are saying is that federal government needs to control speech and communication…

Electronic communications privacy from government is what we should also be debating, rather than our attention being diverted from it. Such deeper concerns are what social-media privacy hysteria conveniently obscures.

Reason: Mark Zuckerberg Is Calling for Regulation of Social Media To Lock in Facebook’s Position

By Nick Gillespie

So now Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head honcho at Facebook, is going all in on government regulation.

“The question,” he told Wired’s Nicholas Thompson, “isn’t ‘Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?’ It’s ‘How do you do it?'” On CNN, he said, “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?'”

What gives? I’d like to suggest that Zuckerberg’s response has little or nothing to do with civic-mindedness in the wake of ridiculously overblown panics over Russian trolls buying campaign ads showing Jesus wrestling Satan, or still-cresting fears that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful role as first woman president.

Rather, Zuckerberg is using these incidents as a way to cement Facebook’s centrality in a radically volatile social-media landscape.

Political Advertising

The Federalist: The Cambridge Analytica Panic Is The Silliest Conspiracy Of The Entire Russia Scare

By David Harsanyi

Former Cambridge Analytica contractor and now-professional whistleblower Christopher Wylie told CNN that while at the company he helped build a “psychological warfare weapon” to “exploit mental vulnerabilities that our algorithms showed that [Facebook users] had.”

So, in other words, he worked in the advertising business.

Those who have covered politics for more than a single Trump-cycle should know better than to use this kind of unnerving rhetoric for what amounts to average microtargeting, which has been used by hundreds, if not thousands, of firms…

Moreover, the idea that Facebook can know your “mental vulnerabilities” is only true if you share your nightmares with them. If you’re uncomfortable with data mining and your information being shared, don’t take surveys. Because, breaking news: You don’t have to be on Facebook. You don’t have to use Twitter. You don’t have a constitutional right to play FarmVille without answering some questions…

Most of all, so what if voters were being “targeted?” Part of living in a free society means being bombarded by messages we don’t like. The entire Facebook/Russiabot scare is predicated on the notion that people don’t have free will. It’s only once we start micromanaging the information Americans consume that we begin undermining choices.

The Media

Wall Street Journal: Russia, the NRA and Fake News

By Kimberley A. Strassel

The day Mr. Simpson’s conspiracy-laden transcript was due to go public, McClatchy ran this headline: “FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump.” The story cited only two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.” The article admitted it “could not be learned” whether the FBI had any evidence involving the NRA, but it nonetheless went on at length about the group. A flurry of articles from other news organizations followed, while Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden fired off letters demanding the NRA account for itself. House Democrats jumped in, with Rep. Adam Schiff positing “an effort by Russia to create a back channel or assist the Trump campaign through the NRA.” Another flurry of articles. All still based on nothing but Mr. Simpson’s infiltration claim.

In a response to Mr. Wyden, the NRA flatly denied the accusation. It explained how it scrupulously monitors its donations and noted that all its political decisions are made by U.S. citizens. It also reported it had had no contact with the FBI. House Intelligence Committee Democrats nonetheless last week issued a document demanding they get to continue investigating the “NRA’s relationship” with Mr. Torshin and Ms. Butina as well as . . . Washington lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who hasn’t done legal work for the NRA in a decade.

Corporate Speech

Washington Post: U.S. companies are pressuring their workers on how to lobby and vote

By Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Roughly a quarter of U.S. employees say that they have heard about politics from their bosses. That’s what I learned from a nationally representative telephone poll of 1,032 non-self-employed U.S. workers, which I commissioned for the book and which was conducted by SSRS Inc. in April 2015. The survey involved live interviews using random-digit dialing of landlines and cellphones; the response rate was 6.7 percent.

I found similarly consistent results in interviews with more than 30 corporate executives from randomly selected large U.S. companies and national business associations involved in government affairs, as well as from a survey of more than 500 business leaders (both conducted over the course of 2015). In the interviews, corporate managers said mobilizing employees offered a lot of “bang for the buck.” On the survey, responding managers ranked mobilizing employees as being about as effective at changing policy as hiring lobbyists – and even more effective than making PAC contributions. Among managers at businesses with PACs, 17 percent ranked PAC contributions as their most effective strategy; 25 percent of managers ranked mobilization of employees as being most effective.) The bottom line from both data sources: Managers said mobilizing employees was now part of many large U.S. companies’ core political strategies.

FEC

Daily Beast: Devin Nunes Probed by FEC for Possible Campaign-Finance Violations

By Julia Arciga

The Federal Election Commission on Wednesday sent a letter to Nunes’ campaign committee, raising red flags about some particular contributions received in 2017. The letter, sent to Nunes’ campaign treasurer and mother Toni Dian Nunes, requested “information essential to full public disclosure” about three potentially illegal contributions.

The States

Chinook Observer: County political parties caught up in statewide campaign-finance fight

By Amy Nile

Glen Morgan, a conservative from Tenino, and other activists have been targeting political groups and candidates across Washington, accusing them of failing to follow rules for reporting campaign spending and contributions…

Liberals countered with a deluge of grievances against conservatives. And local Republicans have been caught in the crossfire of the campaign-finance fight…

In response to his complaint, local Democratic leaders decided to give the party’s money away and dissolve the group to avoid a potential lawsuit, former Chairman Frank Wolfe said.

“Now, there’s no organization to come after,” Wolfe, a county commissioner, said.

Confusing campaign-finance laws that require every penny to be accounted for on a tight timeline are sometimes tough for volunteers who run political parties to follow, he said.

“This is happening in virtually every Democratic organization in the state,” Wolfe, of Ocean Park, said. “When you’re a small, rural club, you might not be as sophisticated as you need to be.”

If the attorney general and county prosecutor decide against taking the party to court for the violations, Morgan could sue the organization and its committee officers. He has gone after Democrats from other counties and some of the organizations have been forced to disband or ordered to pay penalties.