JK Rowling Threatens To Sue Amnesty International Into Oblivion For Expressing An Opinion About A Charity She Funds

Free Speech

from the so-very-free-speechy dept

JK Rowling has spoken about how she wrote the first Harry Potter book while she was employed at Amnesty International and how much that experience influenced her writing, and how she learned “the power of human empathy” from working there. Rowling was also, you’ll recall, one of the high profile signers of the infamous Harper’s Letter on “open debate.”

Now she’s threatening to bankrupt Amnesty International for expressing an opinion about Beira’s Place, a “women only” charity Rowling created.

Amnesty International UK had released a report, expressing its well-supported opinion about so-called “anti-rights actors,” specifically calling out a number of groups that it believed, through their statements or actions, sought to “restrict human rights by undermining human rights protections in law and practice.” It had a section on “anti-gender” efforts by some groups which have targeted trans rights and pointed out that:

“Human rights are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. When the rights of one group are restricted, protections for others can also be weakened, even where the effects are not immediately visible.”

This should be a fairly non-controversial statement. But, the report named a number of organizations that it deemed to be “gender critical,” which are, in effect, organizations that have — through their words or actions — done damage to trans rights in particular, and the wider LGBTQ+ space.

No matter your stance on any of this, expressing an opinion about an organization should be seen as part of their free speech and… what’s the term Rowling used in the Harper’s letter? Right, “open debate.”

But, no, not here. One of the organizations that Amnesty mentioned was Beira’s Place, which Rowling helped create as an organization to provide support for female victims of sexual violence. However, aligned with Rowling’s transphobic views and campaigning, the organization proudly insists that it is for “women only.” Beira’s Place and the constant verbiage surrounding it about being for “women only” have certainly contributed to the sense that it is another part of Rowling’s transphobic mission to diminish and deny rights of transgender women.

To look at Rowling’s X feed, for example, is to witness a near never-ending stream of gleefully obnoxious and petty attacks on trans people who speak up for their own rights. I’d post examples, but I’d rather not give any more attention to that sort of hateful messaging.

Thus it’s entirely reasonable to have and express the opinion that Beira’s Place and other operations that refuse to recognize the rights of trans women (and trans men) are “anti-rights.” I mean, literally part of Beira’s Place’s messaging to the world has been its anti-trans stance.

After all, as the statement above notes, when you deny rights to one group, you are weakening rights for all. And, look, even if you somehow agree with Rowling, if you actually believed in free speech and “open debate” you should at least support Amnesty UK in expressing their opinion that being anti-trans is being anti-rights.

But Rowling seems to absolutely loathe any actual “open debate” regarding her views towards the trans community. Thus, she spoke out angrily about the Amnesty report, leading to a media fury, and causing the organization to pull it down. She has also demanded an apology and threatened to sue the organization:

Lawyers acting for the centre have threatened Amnesty with court action unless it permanently withdraws the report, publicly apologises to the blacklisted groups and commissions an external investigation into how it came to be published.

The letter said: “The [Amnesty] report has wrongly labelled all associated with Beira’s Place, including those accessing support as anti-rights bigots who are seeking to weaken human rights.

“This is a shocking way to describe those who are seeking help to overcome the trauma of sexual violence. There is no basis for these allegations, and our client, with the support of its founder JK Rowling, will not sit back and allow the reputation of Beira’s Place or those who access its support to be tarnished in this way.”

And to make it clear she seeks to burden Amnesty UK with as many costly lawsuits as possible, she’s offering to fund other organizations that wish to sue Amnesty International UK over this report.

That’s her tweeting:

Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by Amnesty UK’s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund.

So much for free speech and open debate, huh?

Rowling has a right to express her own bigotry and hateful views. But Amnesty International and anyone else should also be able to express their opinion that by her words and her deeds she is doing real harm to the rights of trans people worldwide. But Rowling is making every effort to shut that down.

I am sure that Rowling and her supporters will claim, ridiculously, that because she views Beira’s Place and her other anti-trans activism as “pro-women’s rights” that it is somehow defamatory to call it anti-rights. But that’s why it’s a protected opinion. Whether or not one’s views and actions are pro or anti-rights is, inherently, an opinion.

My opinion is that Rowling is a hateful, angry woman who has done tremendous harm to some of the most marginalized people in the world for no reason at all, and her wink wink nod nod “I’m just supporting women’s rights” bullshit as cover for that is both craven and pathetic. She has contributed to a hateful, anti-rights movement that has put millions of people at greater risk. That she is now seeking to effectively silence and potentially destroy the organization that she, herself, claims was so valuable in getting her to understand the value of human empathy is a particularly sad statement on where her life has taken her.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for literally any of her Harper’s Letter co-signers to call out her attacks on the organization’s speech, and threats to their existence for expressing an opinion she doesn’t like. Apparently, that kind of “open debate” is too much?

Filed Under: defamation, free speech, human rights, jk rowling, lgbtq, terfs, trans rights
Companies: amnesty international, beira's place

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act Shut Down (Again) By Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court

Free Speech

from the stopping-the-stoppers dept

Florida Republicans’ bigoted little piece of speech policing — the former “Stop WOKE Act” — has already been terminated multiple times by federal courts. Two lawsuits with two sets of plaintiffs have generated the same results: a ruling declaring the law unconstitutional and an injunction blocking the state from enforcing it.

The law aims to directly regulate speech in classrooms, allowing the government to punish teachers and administrators from engaging in any speech the Florida GOP doesn’t agree with. In practice, this means eliminating discussions about racism, equitable treatment, or anything related to LGBTQ+ issues.

The two lawsuits have generated some pretty stark paragraphs from presiding judges. Both take their cues from pop culture. Noting the cognitive dissonance of state lawmaking, the court said this in 2022:

In the popular television series Stranger Things, the “upside down” describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. See Stranger Things (Netflix 2022). Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely. 

The same court said this when the second lawsuit against the Stop WOKE law crossed its desk:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of “freedom.” To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the State of Florida passed the so-called “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the State’s doublespeak) the “Individual Freedom Act.” The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.

The state appealed both decisions. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction in March 2023. The state continued to assault the court with motions to undo this injunction, prompting the Eleventh Circuit to issue this additional order:

The Clerk is DIRECTED to treat any motion for reconsideration of this order as a non-emergency matter.

Forced to wait its turn, Ron DeSantis and his MAGA buddies have had to wait more than three years just to find out they still won’t be able to enforce this blatantly unconstitutional law. The state’s lawyers will read the whole thing looking for ways to argue this differently if (or when) the US Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

But anyone wanting to know how this turns out for Florida’s public service bigots won’t have to dip too far into the 85-page ruling. By the middle of the fourth page, you’ll know what you need to know. From the decision [PDF]:

When several groups of professors challenged Florida’s new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.

That is not a blessed union. Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.

The injunction stays in place, presumably forever. While there are certainly some members of the Supreme Court who would love to tie their precedent and ethics into knots just to block speech they personally don’t like, this doesn’t appear to be the case they’d choose since it would likely generate precedent that might work against the bigots in the Supreme Court when they go to bat for bigots in the White House.

The appeals court has already blocked the other part of the law — the clauses attempting to regulate speech in private workplaces by forbidding mandatory meetings that promoted views the GOP doesn’t agree with. The last ditch attempt to claim the government can regulate speech in college classrooms doesn’t fare any better, even if it’s not quite as clear cut in terms of constitutional violations as telling private companies what they can and can’t say.

Claiming that all speech by government employees is “government speech” is a non-starter. The state couldn’t find precedent to support its novel take on the First Amendment. And the few odds and ends it threw at the judicial wall in hopes of seeing something stick failed as well.

More credibly, the State explains that it also seeks to protect its “most cherished ideals.” But that justification fails, too. Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them.

The court spends 50 pages dismantling each and every one of the state’s arguments, citation by citation. There can be no doubt the law is unconstitutional, not that it matters to the state, which has already announced it will be appealing the ruling. But this is censorship that can’t even be bothered to pretend it’s anything but the very thing it claims it is opposed to. “Individual Freedom Act” (as it was renamed), my ass.

Florida seeks to strip public university professors—and by extension their students—of the ability to fully engage with ideas that are, for better or for worse, very popular in some academic circles. The State asks us to consider its rules a means of targeting discrimination. But hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind.

There’s a dissent that runs nearly as long as the opinion. Written by Judge Barbara Lagoa (someone with a history of anti-trans rulings), it’s 30+ pages of wasted time. To paraphrase: none of these plaintiffs should have been granted standing, much less relief and also: [bunch of Justice Alito quotes].

Doesn’t really matter, since it’s the dissent but I guarantee if anyone’s going to start polling for an en banc rehearing, it’s going by Judge Lagoa.

Suck it, DeSantis. Until that happens (if it ever will), your stupid hateful law is as dead as the eyes of your sycophants.

Filed Under: 11th circuit appeals court, 1st amendment, florida, free speech, ron desantis, stop woke act, woke

FCC General Counsel Channels Founding Fathers To Falsely Claim First Amendment Allows Banning Porn

Free Speech

from the the-censorship-police-are-getting-bolder dept

Another senior Trump administration official is gleefully showing off his true colors: The current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published an opinion column with the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet The Daily Signal calling for stronger obscenity regulation. 

From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic material. Judicial reactions to internet pornography broke this tradition to our great detriment.

That’s by Adam Candeub, the general counsel for FCC chair Brendan Carr’s censorship regime. Among other things, he was the lawyer who represented the racist Jared Taylor when he unsuccessfully sued Twitter for being moderated. He also was a key player in the first Trump administration’s effort to get rid of Section 230. Lately, he’s been one of the driving forces behind model legislation that helped lead to mass adoption of age verification laws around the United States. Candeub also contributed the section on Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulatory actions for regulating online speech to the public policy treatise for Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 effort. 

His resumé aside, Candeub’s latest contribution to wider discussion on free speech, pornography, and obscenity law is replete with culture war talking points of very little substance. He frames his arguments as a patriotic call to action referencing the founding fathers of the United States on the occasion of our country’s semiquincentennial year. 

He says they would have “supported” stronger obscenity regulations and a resumption of obscenity prosecutions, echoing recent calls by figures in the religious right and anti-porn movements to do so. It’s easy to claim what people 250 years ago would have said or believed since they’re not around to defend themselves.

But a casual look shows that several of the founding fathers were not particularly pure or morally superior when it came to sex and relationships. Even if you look past their somewhat infamous extramarital affairs, Ben Franklin was famous for both writing and sharing materials that might not even pass the test for obscenity today. Thomas Jefferson expressed deep outrage at the concept of censoring literature based on religious morality tests. Writing to bookseller Nicolas Dufief in 1814 after a magistrate threatened prosecution over a controversial text, Jefferson demanded, “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy?” 

These are not the actions of men who would quickly embrace anti-obscenity laws.

I wrote for Techdirt not too long ago about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, calling pornography a “national security threat” and urging the Department of Justice to resume prosecuting alleged obscenity as a way to fight pornography’s accessibility. 

Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana also sent a letter to Trump’s Justice Department in May, arguing that the feds “[ending] obscenity prosecution was a mistake.”

This all matters, given that Candeub is expected to move to a top-level DOJ position soon.

His anti-porn screed is full of nonsense:

“Americans born after the mid-1990s have lived their entire lives in a world awash with hardcore pornography. Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost. Our laws leave much pornography effectively unregulated. Our technology, especially smartphones, brings portable, private porn shops to everyone’s phone.”

Aside from the clear misinformation about an “unregulated” pornography industry, Candeub proposes a supposed moral restoration of obscenity laws such that anything viewed through the lens of non-traditional sexual expression could be fair game for legislatures to heavily restrict or outright ban. 

Much of his column summarizes a report he produced on the topic for the Heritage Foundation, which was published on July 6. The report is aptly titled, “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age.” It is replete with the same talking points from the most extremist elements of the anti-pornography movement who desire to ban all pornography.

He praises the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, which found that Texas could require age verification for online adult content, despite it going against previous Supreme Court First Amendment precedent.

The report also calls for the return of Comstock laws and the patchwork of anti-vice statutes that were historically used to prosecute individuals for “obscene” devices, the transmission of “prurient” content, and other prohibitions that lasted into the 20th century. 

Most alarming, he views the high court’s 6-3 decision in the Paxton case as an optimistic but quite unclear step to modern Comstock prosecutions in state-level courts:

“Paxton may signal the reinvigoration of a dual-track approach to the regulation of obscenity: States can require oversight for minors, and mostly anything goes for adults. At the least, it is unclear what effect, if any, Paxton will have on obscenity for adults.”

He adds:

“The most optimistic result under current law would be a reinvigorated Miller with the national government again able to regulate the transmission of obscenity. The case’s flexible terms could allow for obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission. Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”

The bolded text is Candeub’s silver bullet. By his interpretation of the current Comstock law, the incumbent FCC’s general counsel is essentially calling for criminal prosecution for transmitting “obscene” web content across state lines because, well, the internet exists and it transcends borders. 

This is exceptionally problematic for two reasons. First, Candeub works for the FCC and is backing a legal strategy that’s been used, historically, to aggressively prosecute women, LGBTQ+ individuals, entire communities of color, consensual sex workers, and pornographic and non-pornographic publishers for their speech. 

This is the FCC presenting itself as the morality speech police.

Second, Candeub’s advocacy in this report and column conforms to Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s call for the prosecution of “pornographers” who spread “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography.”

We’ve seen this idiocy before. 

Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography. He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity. All of this is done in the guise of “restoring public morality” and “protecting children” from a supposed cultural decay. 

Coming from the lead attorney for Trump’s FCC, one of the architects of Project 2025, and a likely to be senior DOJ official, this signals a terrifying push forward towards a public policy agenda to enable greater and greater censorship by dubbing things like LGBTQ+ content and legal adult pornography as something that can be banned.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, adam candeub, brendan carr, comstock laws, doj, fcc, free speech, fsc v. paxton, ftc, obscenity

Mexico Passed Speech Laws To Protect The Powerless. The Powerful Used Them To Silence Critics.

Free Speech

from the speech-laws-always-get-weaponized dept

For over a decade, a particular argument keeps resurfacing from well-meaning progressives: the rise of authoritarianism around the globe is a good reason to pass laws suppressing speech. The idea is that somehow, magically, without free speech, authoritarians and fascists would never come to power in the first place. This is historically illiterate. It’s also stupid. As we’ve argued for many, many years, speech suppressing laws are always eventually used by the powerful to suppress the speech of their critics.

The latest example comes from Mexico, where the current leadership has played up “press freedoms,” but at the same time, powerful politicians are using laws ostensibly passed to protect the marginalized… to imprison journalists instead. The New York Times piece makes the pattern concrete in a way that should be eye-opening to many.

Take, for example, the situation with politician Mara Chama Villa. She used a law that was passed to stop “gender-based political violence.” That sounds good, right? Most good folks would agree that “gender-based political violence” is bad. But in this case, Chama Villa claimed that a satirical radio skit mocking her for being a nepobaby candidate violated the law:

It started with a one-minute audio cartoon. Three siblings asked their influential father to buy them candidacies for the upcoming 2024 elections, squabbling over who got to run for which party.

The satirical spot broadcast on Radio Teocelo, the local community-run radio station that also produced the ad, did not mention names, actual political parties or locations.

But Mara Chama Villa, who was running to represent the area in Congress with Mexico’s Ecologist Green Party — and whose father had been the mayor of Teocelo, a coffee-producing town in the state of Veracruz, the deadliest for journalists — felt targeted. She filed a complaint against Radio Teocelo and reporters from other outlets who had previously covered her failed attempt in 2021 to succeed her father as mayor.

Their coverage, she argued in legal filings reviewed by The New York Times, minimized her career and hurt her chances to win the election.

In April 2025, a federal court found five reporters guilty of gender-based political violence because they had “minimized” Ms. Chama Villa “by subordinating her to a male figure with political power,” the court said in its ruling.

The impact of being found guilty — again, for making a satirical radio spot that would be common all over the globe — was pretty massive:

The penalties were sweeping: fines exceeding a month’s salary, mandatory public apologies, the deletion of the radio spot and all denounced articles and placement on a national registry of gender-violence offenders.

Oh, and some more chilling effects, just for fun. If you criticized the ruling? Well, you got added to a follow-on legal process:

When journalists, analysts and organizations across Mexico criticized the outcome, the dispute ballooned into a nationwide case targeting about 70 people.

This is, quite obviously, the opposite of freedom of the press or freedom of speech. And I’d argue it does not do anything positive towards stopping “gender-based political violence.” It’s just become a tool for a powerful political family to punish journalists who produced a bit of satire.

And this isn’t a one-off, as the Times highlights other cases using the same law to target activists as well:

Earlier this year, a court sanctioned Miguel Alfonso Meza, an anti-corruption activist, for gender-based political violence against Silvia Delgado, a lawyer who represented the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, best known as El Chapo. Mr. Meza had called her a “narco lawyer” when questioning her candidacy for a criminal judgeship in Mexico’s first-ever judicial election.

When the court later partly revoked the penalties on Mr. Meza, Ms. Delgado said that she would appeal that ruling. Her goal, she added in an interview, was “not to silence anyone, but to fight for dignity.”

“By describing my candidacy as highly dangerous and comparing me to other candidates investigated for drug trafficking,” she said, “he unleashed excessive attacks against me.”

The article also describes a crime reporter who was accused of “terrorism” because his reporting on local drug cartels “caused public panic” leading him to being dragged from his car and arrested (he thought he was being kidnapped). He now admits that he’s stopped chasing stories he used to chase.

The chilling effects in such a system are unavoidable.

Mexican politicians can defend these laws all they like. No one supports gender-based political violence or terrorism — and that’s exactly what makes the laws so useful to the people abusing them. A law nobody can be seen opposing is a law nobody can stop. And so a community radio station gets fined a month’s salary over a one-minute cartoon, an anti-corruption activist gets sanctioned for calling El Chapo’s lawyer a “narco lawyer,” and a crime reporter stops chasing the stories that made him a crime reporter.

This is how it always goes. Every time you hand the state a tool to punish “bad” speech, the people who end up wielding it are whoever holds power — and they get to decide what counts as “bad.”

If that still sounds like a worthwhile trade — speech restrictions now to keep the fascists out later — consider that we ran this exact experiment a century ago. Weimar Germany had hate speech laws. Prosecutors used them against Nazis, including Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer, who was convicted and jailed more than once for incitement against Jews. The laws did not stop the Nazis. Indeed, the Nazis used these prosecutions as yet more “evidence” that they were being prosecuted for their beliefs. Then, the Nazis took power, inherited those very tools, and turned them on everyone else. Streicher walked out of the courtroom a martyr and into the Reichstag. The speech laws meant to stop authoritarians became the authoritarians’ speech laws.

So here’s the only test that matters before you back a law like this: imagine the politician you distrust the most holding the pen. Because eventually, they will. And anyone who answers “with this law on the books, they’ll never get into power” is indulging in childishly naive wishful thinking — the same wish that has been losing to authoritarians for as long as there have been authoritarians.

You don’t keep bad people from power by handing the office a weapon and hoping good people get there first. You keep them out with stronger elections, stronger institutions, and an educated public that can see through them.

Not by deciding which speech to outlaw — and then praying you’re always the one holding the pen.

Filed Under: free press, free speech, gender-based political violence, mara chama villa, mexico
Companies: radio teocelo

Four Years After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Keep Coming For Online Speech

Free Speech

from the taking-away-rights-is-an-ongoing-process dept

Last week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion has also become a fight over online speech and government censorship as a steady stream of proposed laws, cease-and-desist letters, lawsuits, and government investigations have targeted the websites and online resources that help people find and learn about reproductive healthcare.

This is an effort by anti-abortion government officials to mold the information ecosystem, restrict what people can read, and cut off the ways people communicate with one another. We’ve watched this build for years, and the encouraging news is that many of these efforts have failed. The worrying news is that they keep coming. And if they’re allowed to succeed, this could have repercussions for freedom of expression online beyond reproductive rights.

Targeting Sites That Just Share Information

The clearest tell that this is also a war on speech is that officials have aimed their efforts not just at abortion providers or the entities that prescribe and sell medication abortion, but also at websites that do nothing more than tell people what their options are, how to find a doctor, and where abortion remains legal.

Cease-and-Desists & Takedown Demands

State attorneys general have been hitting these online information hubs with cease-and-desist letters and takedown demands. Just this month, for example, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sent cease-and-desist letters to multiple groups with abortion-related websites, including Plan C, a public health campaign that provides educational resources and research on abortion access. Plan C doesn’t sell or ship abortion pills. It simply provides information. Marshall’s office nonetheless claimed Plan C’s website “facilitates, aids, and abets” illegal abortion. The Arkansas attorney general similarly sent out cease-and-desists to several organizations regarding their websites, including Mayday Health, which, like Plan C, provides only information and does not directly prescribe or mail pills.

In another example from earlier this year, North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley threatened legal action and ordered the Prairie Abortion Fund to scrub information off of its website, not because the fund sold pills, but because its site linked to several outside informational resources. The Attorney General primarily focused on the fund’s link to Plan C, meaning the biggest alleged issue was a link to a website that links to other websites where pills can be accessed.

What’s especially concerning is that the state doesn’t have to win, or even file, a lawsuit to get what it wants. Especially for smaller organizations and funds, a letter threatening legal action can be enough to chill their speech, causing them to remove important content and go quiet.

Censorship Mandates

Legislators in multiple states have also attempted to make it illegal to share resources on how to obtain an abortion, including on purely informational websites with a national or global audience. South Dakota recently passed a law making it a felony to “advertise” anything “described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.” Language this broad can easily apply to websites that simply engage in First Amendment-protected advocacy or provide educational resources. Mayday Health, which operates one such website, has since sued the state in federal court to block the law. The lawsuit argues the law could reach something as small as wearing a sweatshirt that carries Mayday’s web address.

Other state legislatures have made similar efforts. Last year, for example, Texas introduced a bill that would have made it illegal to “provide information” on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug. If you exchanged emails, had an online chat, or created a website that shared information about legal abortion services in other states, you could have violated this bill. Luckily this particular bill did not pass, but Texas has attempted to pass similar laws for several years now.

Dressing Censorship Up as Consumer Protection

A major way anti-abortion officials are targeting online speech is by weaponizing consumer protection and deceptive advertising laws, claiming that providing information about abortion violates them. This tactic is a threat to free speech rights. The First Amendment protects publishing truthful information on a public issue, and the Supreme Court has expressly said that includes providing information about legal abortion in a state where it is illegal.

Yet states like South Dakota have continued to use deceptive advertising claims to go after abortion speech. Last year, South Dakota sent a cease-and-desist and then filed a lawsuit against Mayday Health for running ads that simply read: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be?” with a link to Mayday’s website. The state claimed the ads were “deceptive.” Mayday then counter-sued in federal court, challenging South Dakota’s actions under the First Amendment. Though the federal judge ultimately declined to step in while the parallel state case was pending, she made a point of saying she believed Mayday’s website constitutes “speech subject to protection under the First Amendment.”

Other states have attempted to run the same play. Missouri sued Planned Parenthood in 2025 under its consumer-protection statute, calling a webpage that says abortion pills are safe an “unfair and deceptive” trade practice. Florida went even further, invoking its RICO law—a law typically used for organized crime—over the same kind of statement. Florida leaned heavily on a single study funded by an anti-abortion think tank, even as major medical organizations and decades of research put the serious-complication rate below half a percent. States should not be able to cherry-pick studies in order to erase online speech.

Going After Intermediaries & Erasing Whole Websites

Some officials aren’t content to restrict only certain abortion-related content—they want the websites gone entirely.

Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general last year. Letters were sent directly to internet intermediaries (entities that facilitate use of the internet, such as internet service providers, web-hosting providers, or things like search engines and social media platforms). The letters demanded that both a domain registry company and a web host stop supporting a site that discusses abortion drugs. But as we know, if we cut off the host or the domain, the speech disappears for everyone—not just for people in Arkansas.

Likewise, Texas’s 2025 bill would have required intermediaries to take down abortion-related content. It’s worth remembering that the imposition of civil and criminal liability on intermediaries also conflicts with a federal law that protects online intermediaries’ ability to host user-generated speech, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), including speech about abortion medication.

The push has gone federal, too. In March 2026, Senator Bill Cassidy and colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee pressed the FDA to use every tool it has against online sellers, including leaning on the domain registrars that keep these sites online.

Why This Should Worry Everyone

It’s tempting to see this as limited to the fight over reproductive rights. That would be a mistake. For people seeking care, the immediate harm is obvious: the internet is often the only place to find accurate, potentially life-saving information, and every letter, lawsuit, and takedown threat makes that information harder to find and riskier to share.

But the damage doesn’t stop there. We’re witnessing a live experiment in how to use consumer-protection laws, criminal statutes, and pressure on intermediaries to suppress a disfavored viewpoint, pull information offline, and make websites disappear. To think these tactics can only be used against abortion speech would be naïve. 

We hope courts and legislatures will continue to protect free speech online. But the continued drumbeat of threatening letters, lawsuits, and investigations is its own kind of harm. Here at EFF, we’ll keep defending the right to share and read information online—about abortion, and about everything else.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, abortion, censorship, dobbs, speech

Thin-Skinned Palantir Loses Its Bid To Bully A Swiss Magazine Into Publishing Its Rebuttals To Embarrassing Reporting

Free Speech

from the swiss-slapp-suits dept

Earlier this year we wrote about the ridiculous thin-skinned executives at Palantir suing a small independent Swiss online magazine, Republik, that had reported on the great lengths the company had gone to, trying to get the Swiss government to purchase Palantir’s surveillance technology. Palantir knew they couldn’t sue for defamation because, you know, everything Republik reported was true. Instead, they sued, trying to invoke a Swiss “right of reply” law, claiming that because Republik refused to publish the press release Palantir wanted to run in response to the reporting, the magazine had violated the law.

As we said at the time, this is the height of entitlement. Palantir doesn’t get to tell Republik how and what it must publish.

And, thankfully, a court has agreed. Zurich’s commercial court rejected 22 of 23 claims that Palantir made.

The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the company and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.

While the court agrees that there is a “right of reply” law in Switzerland, it has limitations:

While Swiss media law allows the subjects of a story to request a right of reply, this has caveats: the right of reply has to be concise and stick to the facts of the story.

The one count that stuck: the court found that a single passage in just one article warranted a limited published reply from Palantir.

Also, the court told Palantir to pay Republik for its legal expenses wasted on this SLAPP suit:

The court on Friday ordered Palantir to bear 95% of the 9,000 Swiss francs ($11,300; £8,400) court costs and to pay Republik 9,900 francs in legal expenses.

Of course, this case was always less about the ‘right of reply’ than about making it clear to anyone who reports critically on Palantir that the company will go to war with them, seeking any legal theory, no matter how ridiculous, to tie them up in court — the textbook logic of a SLAPP suit. Republik has said that defending the case cost the small organization quite a lot in time and resources:

Balz Oertli, a journalist with WAV research collective, said: “We invested a great deal of effort into this case, and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

Anyway, given that Palantir seems really upset about Republik’s reporting, it sure would be a shame if you decided to go read this critical reporting of Palantir’s relentless attempts to win business from the Swiss government.

Filed Under: chilling effects, free speech, right of reply, switzerland
Companies: palantir, republik

Man Arrested For Playing Darth Vader’s Theme Music At National Guard Troops Scores Settlement

Free Speech

from the maybe-don't-compound-your-evilness-with-stupidity dept

Some readers might look at this headline and think there’s something off about it. And I’ll grant you that. There are several ways music can be played: to, for, not at all. Sometimes though, the only way to describe the playing of music is “at.”

One of Trump’s many vindictive “surges” targeting cities and states run by Democratic party members occurred in Washington DC. Not content to flood the streets with tons of federal officers, the administration decided these forces needed backup from the National Guard. Of course, Trump claimed the crime problem in DC was so bad it could only be dealt with by a surge that blended choice bits from “police state” and “martial law” into an unpalatable whole.

DC residents were less than thrilled. One resident — Sam O’Hara — made his displeasure known by doing the thing in the headline: playing music at National Guard troops.

Here’s how that mild act of protest was described in his lawsuit against the city by his ACLU legal reps:

 Given the roughly 200-year-old tradition of civilian law enforcement in the United States, Mr. O’Hara was deeply concerned about the normalization of troops patrolling D.C. neighborhoods. And so, he began protesting the Guard members’ presence by walking several feet behind them when he saw them in the community. Using his phone and sometimes a small speaker, he played The Imperial March as he walked, keeping the music at a volume that was audible but not blaring. Mr. O’Hara recorded the encounters and posted the videos on his TikTok account, where millions of people have viewed them.

And here’s how it looked, from O’Hara’s POV:

I really hate to begin a sentence with “if you’re not familiar with The Imperial March.” And so I haven’t, via the clever use of punctuation. Just in case the presiding judge was unfamiliar, the lawsuit included a brief explainer:

In the Star Wars franchise, The Imperial March is the music that plays when Darth Vader or other dark forces enter a scene or succeed in their dastardly plans.

One of the National Guard troops objected to being Bluetoothed in public. Sgt. Devon Beck threatened to call the cops if O’Hara didn’t stop. Then he did exactly that. The DC Metro PD immediately fell down on the job, arresting O’Hara for crimes he couldn’t have possibly committed. He was not “harassing” the troops, as one of the officers claimed. Nor was he impeding their movement. Nor was he preventing people from entering a nearby store, as Officer Campbell alleged. He was standing to the side of it.

Officer Campbell wasn’t done being stupid quite yet.

In response to Mr. O’Hara’s statements that he was engaged in protest, Officer Campbell said, “That’s not a protest. You better define protest. This isn’t a protest. You are not protesting.”

You are wrong, Officer Campbell. Demonstrably wrong, which is a play on words or something… So enjoy that, readers. I’m taking English and grammar for a rough ride in this post, to borrow a bit of law enforcement vernacular. My apologies in arrears.

Anyway, O’Hara gets the last laugh, some money, and the unfortunate confirmation of the implication he made musically. And, while his original salvo targeted National Guard interlopers, it was the Metro PD officers who accosted/arrested him that truly proved the point.

The District of Columbia has reached a settlement agreement for an undisclosed amount of money with a resident who claims police illegally detained him for following an Ohio National Guard patrol while playing Darth Vader’s theme song from “Star Wars” on his phone — an act of protest against the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.

No one is saying how much the settlement is, but it seems like it’s big enough to mean something.

In an email on Friday, an ACLU spokesperson referred to the settlement’s financial terms as “a significant amount” that O’Hara “is pleased with” but said they aren’t disclosing the dollar figure to protect his privacy.

It also may not be O’Hara’s settlement check from the government. There’s still the matter of the National Guard troop who decided to call the police because he personally didn’t care for O’Hara’s playlist. Beck is still defending himself against the lawsuit, but I have no idea what kind of defense this is:

Attorneys for the Guard member, Sgt. Devon Beck, has asked a judge to dismiss O’Hara’s claims against him.

“He was there because that was his assigned duty,” Beck’s lawyers wrote. “This was not an accidental encounter or a one-time disagreement on a public sidewalk.”

So… Beck isn’t responsible for his direct (or contributory) rights violations because he didn’t ask to be deployed to Washington DC? It probably doesn’t matter. Members of the military are rarely sued by US citizens for rights violations because, well, until very recently they were never asked to patrol US neighborhoods or provide support for law enforcement. There are likely layers of immunity that haven’t even been probed yet, but even if the courts decide the troops were acting as federal officers, it’s almost impossible to successfully sue federal officers. If the government agrees to a settlement, it will because it’s afraid its lawyers might fuck things up so badly adverse precedent might be set.

But for now, some justice has been done. O’Hara gets his money. The Metro PD gets a lesson in why it’s rarely a good idea to provide backup to federal forces and, more hopefully, learns something about how to handle people engaged in protected speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, dc metro police, evil empire, free speech, mass deportation, michael perloff, mpd, national guard, trump administration, washington dc

Supreme Court Decides Not To Destroy The First Amendment Just Yet

Defamation

from the phew dept

While we’ve been discussing a bunch of other Supreme Court end-of-term decisions this week, we should also call out two decisions the Supreme Court thankfully decided not to make. These non-decisions continue to help preserve First Amendment speech protections.

First, and most importantly, they rejected Alan Dershowitz’s attempt to appeal his laughably embarrassing SLAPP suit against CNN, which was filed in the hopes of getting it before this Supreme Court as part of the ongoing and extremely dangerous project by the rich and powerful to dismantle the “actual malice” standard found in NYT v. Sullivan. If you want to learn more about that dangerous project, listen to the podcast I recorded with reporter David Enrich, whose book, Murder the Truth, goes deep on this issue.

Dersh seemed to really hope that his case would be the one to overturn Sullivan, but it’s not to be. The Supreme Court denied cert. Of course, with that denial, Justice Clarence Thomas decides to pen another whiny blog about how much he hates the “actual malice” standard. He cites his own previous whining as well as his mentor’s, former Judge Laurence Silberman, who picked up the same cause soon after Thomas starting yelling about it.

The “actual malice” standard for public figures “bears ‘no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.’” Berisha v. Lawson, 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 2) (quoting Tah v. Global Witness Publishing, Inc., 991 F. 3d 231, 251 (CADC 2021) (Silberman, J., dissenting)….

Instead, Thomas believes that public figures deserve extra special protection from critics, again citing his own previous whining:

Instead, the founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed. See McKee v. Cosby, 586 U. S. 1172, 1177 (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring in denial of certiorari). I and others have thus called for reconsideration of the actual-malice standard for public figures.

Thankfully, seven other Justices have no interest in this. However, Thomas did get Gorsuch to sign on to this, which perhaps isn’t surprising, as he’s joined Thomas’s anti-actual malice crusade in the past. However, in Enrich’s book, he uncovers that Gorsuch’s hatred for “actual malice” was based on a study… that was wrong. Apparently Gorsuch hasn’t adjusted his position, even though the data he has relied on has been proven to be incorrect. Not great, but at least this misinterpretation hasn’t infected others on the court yet.

The actual malice standard is what makes First Amendment speech protections function in practice — it’s the mechanism that keeps powerful people from drowning critics in expensive litigation. I get that Clarence Thomas hates the fact that people criticize him and his rich and powerful friends, but that’s a reason for him to go retire somewhere, not to rewrite one of the core planks that makes the First Amendment work.

The other denial is a bit less eventful. The Court refused to hear an appeal from Donald Trump on his $5 million loss (by jury verdict) in one of the defamation suits filed by E. Jean Carroll against him:

In November, Trump came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to hear his appeal. He contended that Carroll’s lawyers should not have been allowed to introduce testimony by other women who also alleged that Trump had assaulted them, as well as the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

In her brief responding to Trump’s petition, Carroll argued that even if the jury should not have been allowed to consider the evidence, it ultimately would not have made a difference because the rest of her case was so strong. She asked the justices to deny review.

On Monday, the justices did so, without a noted dissent from the denial.

Of course, this is just one of two separate cases that Trump lost to Carroll on, and he’s also appealing the other one — the $83 million verdict — and that’s still pending. However, for now Trump appears shocked that his buddies on the Supreme Court didn’t get him out of this particular pickle. Once again, nothing short of total, unconditional loyalty will ever satisfy Trump.

In the meantime, though, we have the Court passing on these two cases, both of which might have messed with the basic standards regarding defamation. Passing on both means that, for now, the Supreme Court hasn’t taken a sledgehammer to First Amendment protections.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, actual malice, alan dershowitz, clarence thomas, defamation, donald trump, e. jean carroll, free speech, neil gorsuch, nyt v. sullivan
Companies: cnn

Elon Musk Threatens To Sue Rep. Khanna For… Citing The Lancet About How DOGE Cuts Will Likely Lead To Millions Of Deaths

Defamation

from the elon-is-a-walking-talking-chilling-effect dept

We’ve been pointing out for years that the supposedly “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk is one of the most aggressive abusers of state power to create chilling effects against his critics. So it should come as little surprise to anyone paying attention, that he’s at it again: threatening to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for Khanna’s comments regarding Musk’s time running (though pretending not to run) DOGE, where Elon took great joy in killing USAID, despite having no congressional mandate to do so. At issue was the following comments from Khanna:

Khanna suggested that the Democratic Party take initiative to hold Musk accountable if they were to regain control over the House of Representatives or the Senate.

“I do believe once we take power, there needs to be accountability,” Khanna said on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. “There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk. You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

Khanna continued, “He needs to answer for that. He needs to be subpoenaed. He needs to face investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency]. It’s not just ‘let’s move on.'”

Khanna is referencing a recent Lancet report, which projects the “effects of defunding” USAID on mortality through 2030, and concluding it could lead to 4.5 million child deaths.

So, first things first, Khanna’s statement is clearly not defamatory. First, he doesn’t say that Musk killed that many people. He just says that the results of his cuts while in government should be investigated, and points to the Lancet report. And note that he says “possibly sentenced.” This is clearly him giving his opinion that an investigation should happen based on the Lancet’s analysis. Opinions based on disclosed facts are not defamatory.

Also, Elon Musk is, obviously, a public figure. And thus Musk would need to show actual malice — specifically that Khanna knows that the claims are false. But obviously, Khanna believes the Lancet’s report is worth investigating. There’s no way to prove actual malice.

But, as with so many of Musk’s SLAPP suits, any suit here wouldn’t be about winning. It would be about punishing a public official for daring to suggest that maybe — just maybe — Musk did real damage while running DOGE.

It appears that Musk is really, really sensitive to these claims and has spent days crashing out about it:

One or both of those things apparently didn’t sit right with the richest person in the universe, who responded by calling the representative an “evil liar,” a “robber,” and an “insider trader.” Then he threatened to sue Khanna, agreed that he should be arrested, and told his 240 million X followers that “Ro the Robber should be in prison!!” That all happened on Monday, but apparently sleeping on it didn’t change Musk’s feelings about the situation. On Tuesday he shared a post encouraging him to “take Ro ‘the Robber’ for every penny that he has”

He later retweeted Rand Paul’s false claim that USAID funded COVID, adding “USAID money killed millions” — a baseless assertion backed by nothing, in direct contrast to the peer-reviewed Lancet study he’s threatening to sue Khanna over.

The whole thing is ridiculously censorial — Musk is trying to get Khanna to shut up and prevent Congress from examining the actual impact of his (brief, but very eventful) leadership of DOGE. Turns out Musk doesn’t like either free speech or government transparency when it comes to his own actions.

There’s an extra layer of irony in who, exactly, Musk has chosen to go after. When Khanna was first elected to Congress a decade ago, he was Silicon Valley’s guy — backed by a massive war chest of tech billionaire money. Now those same circles are cheering Musk on to “take every penny” from him, because Khanna has since suggested the ultra-rich might pay marginally more in taxes and that Congress look into what DOGE actually did. As recently as last year, when Musk and Trump had a brief falling out, Khanna was even among those who explored whether Musk might shift his support toward Democrats — that’s how vast Musk’s gravitational pull had become over the entire ecosystem, critics included. Now that pull is being used to threaten financial ruin over a Congressional Representative citing a peer-reviewed journal.

It remains a complete travesty that there’s been no accountability, no responsibility, and no full accounting of just how much damage Musk did in his few months taking a chainsaw to large parts of the federal government, despite having zero congressional authority to do any of that.

The fact that he’s now threatening to abuse the courts to “take every penny” from Khanna for daring to suggest Congress should actually do its job and figure out what the fuck happened in the Executive Branch last year should (not for the first time) put to rest the idea that Musk has ever been a free speech supporter. He’s petty, vindictive and censorial, and not above using his extreme wealth to punish those who point out he’s an emperor with no clothes.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, deaths, defamation, doge, elon musk, free speech, free speech absolutism, ro khanna, usaid

Trump Threatens ABC For Doing Journalism About His Reflection Pool Screw Up

Free Speech

from the authoritarians-are-very-sensitive dept

Earlier this year America’s idiot king offered a no-bid contract to one of his ex-con Mara Lago donors to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It… did not go well. Said pool is now full of algae and peeling paint, and it’s created an interesting attention flashpoint for the press and another perfect metaphor for the Trump administration’s corrupt crony capitalist bonanza.

As ABC News reports, Trump has repeatedly (and falsely) tried to claim that the disaster is a result of vandalism, despite there being no evidence (the pool is under 24/7 video surveillance):

“Trump first made the claim the lining had been cut in a post on his social media platform on Saturday, saying then that vandals had put a 250-foot-long “gash” in the lining.

Neither the Interior Department nor the White House has provided evidence that the pool lining had been cut.”

Thin skinned authoritarian that he is, Trump doesn’t like when journalists explain how incompetent and corrupt he is. So he immediately took took his personal money-losing propaganda website to once again threaten ABC with lawsuits for doing (what really is fairly innocuous) journalism:

The man is genuinely not well.

ABC did, of course, pay Trump a $16 million bribe in 2024 to settle a baseless lawsuit the company could have easily won. But as Trump’s FCC has ramped up its censorship and harassment campaign against ABC, there have been signs that Disney Corporation is starting to show some backbone.

For example one recent filing by Disney/ABC makes it clear that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr concocted a fake scandal in collaboration (with right-wing friendly broadcasters) to make it seem like ABC’s Houston affiliate did something illegal. All to manufacture a controversy surrounding Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico (whose empathy and hot girlfriend appear to upset Republicans greatly).

ABC has also recently been airing spots urging ABC viewers to give the FCC an earful about its multiple, overlapping efforts to censor ABC journalists and comedians. As Trump’s health and political influence wanes, you may see formerless feckless companies demonstrate something vaguely resembling a backbone; assuming they don’t have active mergers awaiting regulatory review.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, abc news, censorship, corruption, donald trump, free speech, journalism, media, reflecting pool
Companies: abc, disney