FIRE backs pollster in Trump lawsuit, Meta tosses fact-checkers, Pinker's classic ‘The Blank Slate’ is Book of the Month, & more!

Bringing you latest free speech news (1/12/25)

Story of the week

• FIRE to defend veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer in Trump lawsuit over outlier election poll

“Punishing someone for their political prediction is about as unconstitutional as it gets,” said FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere. “This is America. No one should be afraid to predict the outcome of an election. Whether it’s from a pollster, or you, or me, such political expression is fully and unequivocally protected by the First Amendment.”

This week in FIRE’s blog

• University of Washington alumni seek to revive the spirit of free inquiry by Bobby Ramkissoon

• Meta’s content moderation changes closely align with FIRE recommendations by

  Ryne Weiss

• FIRE statement on legislative proposals to regulate artificial intelligence

The sprawling reach of legislative proposals like TRAIGA run headlong into the expressive rights of the people building and using AI models. Rather than compelling disclaimers or imposing content-based restrictions on AI-generated expression, legislators should remember the law already protects against defamation, fraud, and other illegal conduct. And rather than preemptively saddling developers with broad liability for an AI model’s possible output, lawmakers must instead examine the recourse existing laws already provide victims of discrimination against those who would use AI — or any other communicative tool — to unlawful ends.

• New policy gives Cornell head start on New Year’s gains by Ross Marchand

• FIRE’s defense of pollster J. Ann Selzer against Donald Trump’s lawsuit is First Amendment 101 by

  Adam Steinbaugh
  & Conor Fitzpatrick

• A decade after ‘Charlie Hebdo’ killings, we are still failing blasphemers by

  Sarah McLaughlin

This week in ERI

• Escaping the AI Guilt Trap in Texas by me

• METACOMMENTARY: Why Meta’s move to community notes is good by

  Adam Goldstein
  & me

FIRE in the press

• Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers (Persuasion) by FIRE Senior Fellow

  Jacob Mchangama

It’s important to note that crowdsourced fact-checking is not a zero-sum game between the crowd and experts. Ordinary users who contribute to community notes rely on experts and rigorous reporting by serious journalists to provide sources that convince other users of the usefulness of the note. In other words, professional fact-checkers and journalists can still contribute to the pursuit of truth, just not as the platform-appointed arbiters of that truth. This is a healthy development, though obviously not a panacea against lies, bullshit and propaganda.

This week on ‘So to Speak’

• This week on

  So to Speak
  ,
  Nico Perrino
  sat down with University of Winnipeg professor & author of the new “Rethinking Free Speech,” Peter Ivies, who contends that the conversation around free speech — whether on campus, social media, or in government — is too simplistic and requires more nuance.

International free speech stories of the week

• Marvel game ‘bans’ the words ‘free Taiwan’ and ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ (The Times) by Mark Sellman

• Truss legal threat to PM over claim she crashed economy (BBC) by Chas Geiger

• Vietnam Prosecutes Lawyer for Criticizing Court Actions (HRC) by Patricia Gossman

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Tennessee v. Cardona

The federal district court in Eastern Kentucky vacated the U.S. Department of Education’s sweeping 2024 update to its Title IX rules that implement the federal statutory prohibition on sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, which applies to nearly all colleges and universities, public or private. The court held the revised rules exceed DOE’s statutory authority, violate the Constitution, and represent arbitrary and capricious agency action. Of constitutional note, it held that insofar as the rules’ definitions of sex discrimination and sex-based harassment (combined with their de minimis harm standard for violations) require using names and pronouns reflecting a student’s asserted gender identity, they violate the First Amendment’s bar on the government chilling speech or compelling affirmance of beliefs with which a speaker disagrees. It also held the rules are vague and overbroad in not adhering to the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision on proscribable harassment in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which held Title IX harassment is unwelcome sex-based conduct “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” The new regulation, this week’s decision held, “goes far beyond this standard” in prohibiting such conduct that, “based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.” This makes several of the terms in the regulation “so vague that recipients of Title IX funds have no way of predicting what conduct will violate the law.” Just as FIRE has long argued, repeatedly.

Book of the month

The first Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award of 2025 goes to FIRE Advisory Council member Steven Pinker's “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (2002). In it, he makes the argument that the “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy is false, and that reality is much better described as “nature + nurture.” Unfortunately, the “pure nurture” or “we are born blank slates” argument has strong ideological heft, particularly on campus, to the point that it forms a sort of science denialism of its own. I've always found this peculiar, as the idea that all differences in talents or outcomes are attributable to environmental factors is much more firmly rooted in moral or political considerations than it is in science.

Adherents of “blank slateism” also don’t seem to grasp that a “pure nurture” argument results in some pretty nasty conclusions. “Why am I not an Olympic-level gymnast? Clearly my parents were terrible.” “Why did many of our favorite actors go into acting rather than astrophysics? They must have had a family with questionable priorities.” “Why didn’t I EGOT? Must be my third grade teacher who didn't believe in me.” The blank slate approach is borrowed from the otherwise excellent thinking of John Locke, who said that humans come into this world essentially a blank slate upon which anything can be written, and develop practically all of their faculties through experience. It seemed like this idea was on the ropes back in 2002, and that people began to see it as an ideological oversimplification of a much more complex biological reality. Unfortunately, it persists in a variety of ways and in a number of areas of inquiry, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. That’s why Pinker’s book is as important as ever.

As luck would have it, Pinker is slated to speak at USC Dornsife’s Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives conference this weekend — which, barring any major developments with the Los Angeles wildfires, I plan to be attending to deliver a few remarks.