Prosecutors and police had read the law, which restricts "advertisements," as broadly banning racial slurs; the Connecticut court read it, as written, to restrict only commercial advertisements.
"Today's decision is a victory for the First Amendment that should be celebrated by everyone who hopes to see the internet continue as a place where even difficult and contentious issues can be debated and discussed freely," said one attorney.
Plus: Government regulation of speech is on trial, biohackers flock to experimental charter city in Honduras, and more…
At the World Economic Forum, Brian Stelter and panelists discuss why everything is Facebook's fault.
A defendant had argued that she could allow Black Lives Matters posters but forbid MAGA hats on the theory that, "While the Black Lives Matter poster is a symbol of cultural acceptance and inclusivity ... Mr. Dodge's MAGA hat is a symbol commonly associated with white supremacy and other anti-immigrant sentiments." No, says a Ninth Circuit panel.
“[G]overnment officials ... should not be unduly constrained in their attempts to regulate hate speech for the purpose of protecting the intended targets of said speech. This may require some refining of the Supreme Court’s prior guidance in its precedents.... For example, the Court could consider modifying the Brandenburg test to require only a probable and emerging threat of violence rather than imminent lawless action as a result of speech in order to regulate it.”
“Students ... remain free to express offensive and other unpopular viewpoints [at least outside school], but that does not include a license to disseminate severely harassing invective targeted at particular classmates in a manner that is readily and foreseeably transmissible to those students.”
"[T]rauma and lived experiences," the newspaper says, "are not open for debate."
Join Reason on YouTube and Facebook at 1 p.m. Eastern for a live analysis of the internal Twitter documents recently published by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger.
The most disturbing aspect of the “Twitter Files” is the platform’s cozy relationship with federal officials who demanded suppression of speech they considered dangerous.
Instead of debating whether the platform has been flooded by bigotry, Elon Musk should tell the congressman to mind his own business.
by Jacob Mchangama (Justitia), Heini Skorini (Univ. of Faroe Islands) & Mathias Meier (Justitia).
"The state of New York can't turn bloggers into Big Brother, but it's trying to do just that," said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner.
The "free speech absolutist" is maintaining some content restrictions while loosening others.
Plus: Freedom's Furies, SCOTUS to take up student loan forgiveness plan, and more...
Plus: Hate speech is free speech, tax gap is stable, and more...
The return of the trollish forum demonstrates the futility of bans on bad speech.
The world’s politicians offer a friendly reception to attacks on free speech.
A crackdown on insults, hate speech, and misinformation punishes dissenters who express themselves in ways that offend government officials.
Cloudflare's decision brings up fundamental questions about how internet infrastructure companies should operate.
The innocuously-titled Online Safety Bill threatens citizens' rights to privacy and to speak freely.
They thus can't be punished under a disturbing the peace law that bans "obscene language," though under the right circumstances they could be punished under separate provisions that generally ban "fighting words" (whether racially offensive or otherwise).
"In Massachusetts, we have recently seen multiple incidents of groups espousing deeply offensive and hurtful ideologies displayed on our streets."
Dedication to free speech is in short supply around the world, with Britain and Canada previously considering similar bills.
“Defendants cannot claim a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption to regulate C.G.’s off-campus speech by simply invoking the words ‘harass’ and ‘hate’ when C.G.’s speech does not constitute harassment and its hateful nature is not regulable in this context.”
Its operative provisions just require social media platforms to create a mechanism for taking complaints about such "hateful" speech; but the title is "hateful conduct prohibited," and it's clear the legislature is trying to get social media platforms to restrict such speech more.
David Kopel at the National Firearms Law Seminar
The result might have been different "if plaintiff's speech had occurred off-campus."
In response to the Buffalo massacre, Gov. Kathy Hochul invoked a hoary analogy to justify censorship.
So holds the California Court of Appeal, in sending back to a different judge defendant's motion to retroactively downgrade her conviction (for non-slur resistance to the officers) to a misdemeanor.
A new history of free speech argues the best way to defeat hate speech is by openly confronting it in the public square.
In the new book Free Speech, the Danish activist defends radical self-expression from Socrates to social media.
