A chaos tornado comes to Washington, Paramount mustn’t cave to Trump, a plea for institutional modesty, Justin Amash joins FIRE’s Advisory Council, & more!

Bringing you the latest free speech news (2/9/25)

Feb 09, 2025

It’s been nearly impossible to keep up with the news cycle since Trump was sworn into office. From executive orders to cabinet confirmations, to some fever dream I must’ve had about Gaza becoming the Riviera, it’s really like a chaos tornado has swept through the capital.

Come what may, though, our goal at ERI will remain the same: to provide honest, impartial, and accurate commentary on the free speech news of the day, even if it kills us (and this week it felt a little bit like it might).

We’re committed to calling balls and strikes in a non-partisan way, just like we always have for the last 25 years. That’s why we’re defending the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer against Trump's speech-chilling SLAPP suit and keeping a close eye on the actions of his administration for potential First Amendment concerns.

We were encouraged when Trump signed his executive order on free speech and when he restored crucial due process rights to college students, but we’ll remain vigilant in holding the administration to its commitments.

Thank you for your support, and we hope you’ll stick it out on what’s sure to be a bumpy, confusing, and oftentimes utterly exhausting ride.

And check out some more of the stuff we did just this week to make sense of — and sometimes battle — the chaos tornado.

Stories of the week

Paramount Shouldn’t Fold to Trump (Reason) by ERI’s own ‘London Calling’ contributor and FIRE General Counsel Ronnie London

Freedom of the press protects journalists and the news media in publishing information — especially in the political sphere — free from official censorship. In that way, a free press serves a vital role as the "Fourth Estate" in our democratic society, keeping citizens informed so that individuals may oversee their government's actions. As Ida B. Wells stated, "The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press."

A Plea for Institutional Modesty (CJR) by FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere

Dear Chairman Carr,
As a First Amendment advocate and former chief counsel to a Federal Communications Commission chairman, I respectfully offer some thoughts for your consideration as you head the agency tasked with regulating broadcast stations and certain other electronic media in the United States: be modest in your assertion of power…

This week in FIRE’s blog

A decade of debate: Celebrating 10 years of the Chicago Principles by Mary Griffin
Ohio Northern sues professor for having the audacity to defend his rights in court by Zach Greenberg
Former Rep. Justin Amash joins FIRE’s Advisory Council by Jordan Howell

“The value of free speech comes from encountering views that are unorthodox, uncommon, or unaccepted. Humans learn and grow by engaging with ideas that challenge conventional thinking,” [Amash] wrote on Twitter back in 2022. “Free speech is a barren concept if people are limited to expressing views already widely held.”
FIRE is excited to announce that Amash has joined our Advisory Council, where his expertise in constitutional law and federal policymaking will support FIRE’s mission to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty.

This week on ‘So to Speak’

This week, So to Speak host Nico Perrino was joined by Ilya Shapiro (who spoke at FIRE’s 2023 gala) to talk about Cancel Culture (including his own dust-up at Georgetown), major SCOTUS free speech cases, and more.

FIRE in the press!

Deporting ‘Pro-Jihadist’ Students: Censorship or Good Governance (The Free Press) by Ilya Shapiro & Robert Shibley

Ilya: It’s odd that I find myself on the other side of a debate over free speech to my friends at FIRE. Usually we are side by side in the fight for the First Amendment. But as with the other rare disagreements I have with them—such as over the forced divestiture of TikTok—it’s because this dispute over President Trump’s executive orders on antisemitism don’t actually have much to do with speech.
Robert: Well, President Trump certainly thinks the orders have to do with speech. The White House’s official fact sheet spells it out: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests. . . we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” Protests and expressions of sympathy are certainly forms of speech.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton (W.D. Tex.)

The federal court for the Western District of Texas enjoined major operative parts of Texas’s Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act. The law would among other things force social media platforms to register every user’s age, restrict targeted ads to known minors, track the service’s content that is “harmful” to minors and once above a specified percentage require age-verifying government ID or biometric data from users, and prevent minors from accessing anything that “promotes, glorifies, or facilitates” a host of behaviors, including suicide, drug abuse, bullying, harassment, or sexual exploitation. That is, the law seeks to childproof the Internet by burdening adults who want to view content that is fully legal for adults. The court granted a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the above-listed requirements, holding the law is a content- and speaker-based regulation whose enjoined provisions likely cannot satisfy strict scrutiny. As to restricting content that “promotes or glorifies” targeted behaviors, the court held not only are those terms and the conduct categories vague, the provision is both over- and under-inclusive—and, the prescribed monitoring and filtering is impermissibly more restrictive than, say, giving parents more information or mechanisms to supervise their kids’ Internet use. The court further held the targeted advertising restrictions are likely unconstitutional for similar reasons, noting they not only lack narrowly tailoring, but the absence of a compelling state interest is by itself fatal. And the content-monitoring and age-verification for material “harmful” to minors “suffer the same flaws,” the court held, especially given “[p]rotecting minors against speech the state deems offensive or inappropriate is not by itself a compelling state interest.” FIRE and Davis Wright Tremaine represented plaintiffs Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, Ampersand Group, and Brandon Closson in the challenge.

Honorable mention: Gartenberg v. Cooper Union (S.D.N.Y.), Sullivan v. The Ohio State University (S.D. Ohio) and Jan v. People Media Project (W.D. Wash.).

Podcast of the month

FIRE’s Executive Vice President and So to Speak podcast host Nico Perrino is in the interviewee’s chair this week! He joins Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie for The Reason Interview about the Biden administration's failures, Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s influence on free speech, and the most pressing First Amendment issues facing the U.S. today.