Censors NERF the world! The U.K. goes Orwellian! A New Hope for Columbia? & more!
Bringing you the latest free speech news (8/25/24)
Story of the week
Censoring the Internet Won’t Protect Kids (Reason) by Rand Paul
The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
While proponents of the bill claim that the bill is not designed to regulate content, imposing a duty of care on internet platforms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of First Amendment–protected speech.
This week in FIRE’s blog
How academic boycotts threaten academic freedom by Robert Shibley
FIRE has long supported the rights of individual students and faculty to make individual decisions about the scholars and institutions with whom they wish to engage — or wish to avoid. Academia could not function if scholars could not exercise their own judgment, even if individual academics may not always act in a way that best serves the interests of open inquiry. The academic boycotts of primary concern arise when individual academic institutions, their subdivisions, or professional organizations enact systematic boycotts to which their members are expected or required to adhere, or that impede individual scholars from engaging with boycotted counterparts. Indeed, these systematic boycotts themselves interfere with the individual rights of faculty to decide which peers to engage or avoid.
FIRE announces block party to celebrate Michigan town’s inaugural First Amendment Day
LAWSUIT: North Carolina woman challenges state’s unconstitutional ‘ballot selfie’ ban
Columbia president resigns: Can this conflict-ridden school shape up on free speech? by
Nope to SCOPE: FIRE sues to block Texas’ unconstitutional internet age verification law
This week in ERI
‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ by Jeffrey Rosen wins this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award by me
FIRE in the press!
The brilliance of free speech is that it allows us to work out our disagreements through dialogue, debate and other tools of persuasion. After all, no one is infallible. No one is free from bias or ignorance. Vesting whoever happens to control the levers of power with the authority to decide which opinions or ideas are out of bounds risks entrenching their views as dogma, stifling our collective pursuit of truth and understanding.
International free speech stories of the week
Hit Chinese Video Game Seeks to Curb ‘Negative Discourse’ (The New York Times) by Daisuke Wakabayashi & Claire Fu
Vietnam sentences blogger Nguyen Chi Tuyen to 5 years in prison (CPJ)
London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup
This week brought yet another win for challengers to the new Title IX regulations with a victory in the Eleventh Circuit on appeal from the Northern District of Alabama, which had been the lone court to side with the federal government. It’s the latest development where states and activists are challenging the new rules in eight separate cases—in all but one (Alabama), courts have blocked the rules from taking effect while challenges to them get litigated—with the previous most recent action being the Supreme Court declining to overturn the stays pending appeal. Looks like the Eleventh Circuit saw the writing on that particular wall, and turned the administrative stay it had already entered into a preliminary injunction covering campuses in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Notable among its rulings are holdings that the Department of Education went too far by redefining "sex" to include "gender identity," ignoring court rulings to the contrary, and that a new definition of "discrimination" in an educational program—to include conduct "so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person's ability to participate"—"flies in the face of" the Supreme Court's Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education standard for peer-on-peer harassment in educational settings, just as FIRE has argued for decades in seeking to protect student First Amendment rights. The new regulations are now halted in 26 states, plus hundreds of schools outside those states, while the challenges work their way through the courts.
Video of the week
The UK just can’t help itself can it? More bad news for free speech across the pond:
“You have been unalived by dysentery.” Nice. Presumably AI image generation can’t say “died” (unless it’s an attempt to bypass Apple IIe Oregon Trail copyright, then my apologies).
I don't understand this. Is anyone going to have the backbone to stand up and tell parents to parent their kids, set limits, take away access? There is plenty of evidence regarding the dangers of unsupervised media consumption. If being able to stay in contact was really the reason parents give their kids phones, flip phone pruchases would be through the roof. Parents, do what's right for your kids, even if it's hard for you.