Facebook’s Oversight Board decided on May 5 retain the suspension of former President Donald Trump from its social media platforms, which includes Instagram. Facebook, along with Twitter and other social media outlets suspended Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, DC, based on their own assessments of the role his tweets played in…
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol raised a host of questions about free expression where the law of the First Amendment is widely misunderstood. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who went to Stanford, graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, claimed Simon & Schuster assaulted the First Amendment by…
WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / The Illinois Supreme Court ruled this week that a northern Illinois public official must be told the name of an anonymous poster to a newspaper website who likened the politician to former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, the child sex abuser. The decision means that the anonymous poster cannot dodge a libel suit by hiding behind anonymity. The Illinois high court ruled unanimously in favor of Stephenson County Board Chairman Bill Hadley, who has been demanding to know the identity of the poster for four years. Under the decision, Comcast, which provides the poster with internet service, would be required to turn over the poster’s identity.
By SCOTT LAMBERT / Former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, a Missourian who graduated from Millikin University and Washington University Law School, recently was sentenced to 42 months for violating multiple counts of the Espionage Act. Sterling was convicted as New York Times reporter James Risen’s source in a chapter of the book State Of War, which described a botched CIA attempt to hinder Iran’s nuclear program. For the press, the story was strictly about Risen’s battle with the government and First Amendment issues. The media never questioned Sterling’s guilt or innocence. As a group, the press stayed on the Risen as hero narrative, leaving Sterling alone.
By GEORGE SALAMON / When Islamist gunmen killed 10 journalists and two policemen in January at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine firebombed in 2011 for its irreverent cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, media reaction to the massacre immediately after was best summed up by the headline of an article in Reason magazine: “I’m all for free speech and murder is wrong, but…” In much of the media the “but” trumped admiration and respect for the slain journalists’ insistence that religions, along with other institutions and ideas, can and should be mocked and laughed at. Media might want to ask themselves if the “negative liberty” granted by the First Amendment allows exceptions for legally irrelevant categories such as “bad taste” or “bad judgment.”