First Amendment

UCLA faculty gets big win in suit against Trump’s university attacks

education, First Amendment, Law, lawsuit, Policy, research funding, Science, Speech, University of California / Rejus Almole / November 17, 2025

Government can’t use funding threats to override the First Amendment.

While UCLA has been most prominently targeted by the Trump Administration, the ruling protects the entire UC system. Credit: Myung J. Chun

On Friday, a US District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the United States government from halting federal funding at UCLA or any other school in the University of California system. The ruling came in response to a suit filed by groups representing the faculty at these schools challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to force UCLA into a deal that would substantially revise instruction and policy.

The court’s decision lays out how the Trump administration’s attacks on universities follow a standard plan: use accusations of antisemitism to justify an immediate cut to funding, then use the loss of money to compel an agreement that would result in revisions to university instruction and management. The court finds that this plan was deficient on multiple grounds, violating legal procedures for cutting funding to an illegal attempt and suppressing the First Amendment rights of faculty.

The result is a reprieve for the entire University of California system, as well as a clear pathway for any universities to fight back against the Trump administration’s attacks on research and education.

First Amendment violations

The Judge overseeing this case, Rita Lin, issued separate documents describing the reasoning behind her decision and the sanctions she has placed on the Trump administration. In the first, she lays out the argument that the threats facing the UC system, and most notably UCLA, are part of a scripted campaign deployed against many other universities, one that proceeds through several steps. The Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is central to this effort, which starts with the opening of a civil rights investigation against a university that was the site of anti-Israel protests during the conflict in Gaza.

“Rooting out antisemitism is undisputedly a laudable and important goal,” Judge Lin wrote. But the investigations in many cases take place after those universities have already taken corrective steps, which the Trump administration seemingly never considers. Instead, while the investigations are still ongoing, agencies throughout the federal government cancel funding for research and education meant for that university and announce that there will be no future funding without an agreement.

The final step is a proposed settlement that would include large payments (over $1.2 billion in UCLA’s case) and a set of conditions that alter university governance and instruction. These conditions often have little to no connection with antisemitism.

While all of this was ostensibly meant to combat antisemitism, the plaintiffs in this case presented a huge range of quotes from administration officials, including the head of the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, saying the goal was to suppress certain ideas on campus. “The unrebutted record in this case shows that Defendants have used the threat of investigations and economic sanctions to… coerce the UC to stamp out faculty, staff, and student ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-Western,’ and ‘Marxist’ speech,” Lin said.

And even before any sort of agreement was reached, there was extensive testimony that people on campus changed their teaching and research to avoid further attention from the administration. “Plaintiffs’ members express fear that researching, teaching, and speaking on disfavored topics will trigger further retaliatory funding cancellations against the UC,” Lin wrote, “and that they will be blamed for the retaliation. They also describe fears that the UC will retaliate against them to avoid further funding cuts or in order to comply with the proposed settlement agreement.”

That’s a problem, given that teaching and research topics are forms of speech, and therefore protected by the First Amendment. “These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended,” Lin concluded.

Beyond speech

But the First Amendment isn’t the only issue here. The Civil Rights Act, most notably Title VI, lays out a procedure for cutting federal funding, including warnings and hearings before any funds are shut off. That level of coercion is also limited to cases where there’s an indication that voluntary compliance won’t work. Any funding cut would need to target the specific programs involved and the money allocated to them. There is nothing in Title VI that enables the sort of financial payments that the government has been demanding (and, in some cases, receiving) from schools.

It’s pretty obvious that none of these procedures are being followed here. And as Lin noted in her ruling, “Defendants conceded at oral argument that, of the billions of dollars of federal university funding suspended across numerous agencies in recent months, not a single agency has followed the procedures required by Title VI and IX.”

She found that the government decided it wasn’t required to follow the Civil Rights Act procedures. (Reading through the decision, it becomes hard to tell where the government offered any defense of its actions at all.)

The decision to ignore all existing procedures, in turn, causes additional problems, including violations of the Tenth Amendment, which limits the actions that the government can take. And it runs afoul of the Administrative Procedures Act, which prohibits the government from taking actions that are “arbitrary and capricious.”

All of this provided Lin with extensive opportunities to determine that the Plaintiffs, largely organizations that represent the faculty at University of California schools, are likely to prevail in their suit, and thus are deserving of a preliminary injunction to block the federal government’s actions. But first, she had to deal with a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that cases involving federal money belong in a different court system. She did so by arguing that this case is largely about First Amendment and federal procedures rather than any sort of contract for federal money; money is being used as a lever here, so they ruling must involve restoring the money to address the free speech issues.

That issue will undoubtedly be picked up on appeal as it makes its way through the courts.

Complete relief

Lin identified a coercive program that is being deployed against many universities and is already suppressing speech throughout the University of California system, including on campuses that haven’t been targeted yet. She is issuing a ruling that targets the program broadly.

“Plaintiffs have shown that Defendants are coercing the [University of California] as a whole, through the Task Force Policy and Funding Cancellation, to stamp out their members’ disfavored speech,” Lin concluded. “Therefore, to afford Plaintiffs complete relief, the entirety of the coercive practice must be enjoined, not just the suspensions that impact Plaintiffs’ members.”

Her ruling indicates that if the federal government decides it wants to cut any grants to any school in the UC system, it has to go through the entire procedure set out in the Civil Rights Act. The government is also prohibited from demanding money from any of these schools as a fine or payment, and it can’t threaten future funding to the schools. The current hold on grants to the school by the government must also be lifted.

In short, the entire UC system should be protected from any of the ways that the government has been trying to use accusations of antisemitism to suppress ideas that it disfavors. And since those primarily involve federal funding, that has to be restored, and any future threats to it must be blocked.

While this case is likely to face a complicated appeals process, Lin’s ruling makes it extremely clear that all of these cases are exactly what they seemed. Just as members of the administration stated in public multiple times, they decided to target some ideas they disfavored and simply made up a process that would let them do so.

While it worked against a number of prominent universities, its legal vulnerabilities have been there from the start.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

UCLA faculty gets big win in suit against Trump’s university attacks Read More »

Big Tech sues Texas, says age-verification law is “broad censorship regime”

1st Amendment, First Amendment, free speech, Policy, texas / Mike M. / October 17, 2025

Texas minors also challenge law

The Texas App Store Accountability Act is similar to laws enacted by Utah and Louisiana. The Texas law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2026, while the Utah and Louisiana laws are set to be enforced starting in May and July, respectively.

The Texas law is also being challenged in a different lawsuit filed by a student advocacy group and two Texas minors.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity,” attorney Ambika Kumar of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said in an announcement of the lawsuit. “The Constitution also forbids restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said the law “extends far beyond social media to mainstream educational, news, and creative applications, including Wikipedia, search apps, and internet browsers; messaging services like WhatsApp and Slack; content libraries like Audible, Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube; educational platforms like Coursera, Codecademy, and Duolingo; news apps from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and The Atlantic; and publishing tools like Substack, Medium, and CapCut.”

Both lawsuits against Texas argue that the law is preempted by the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which struck down a California law restricting the sale of violent video games to children. The Supreme Court said in Brown that a state’s power to protect children from harm “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”

The tech industry has sued Texas over multiple laws related to content moderation. In 2022, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law that prohibits large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user’s viewpoint. Litigation in that case is ongoing. In a separate case decided in June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites.

Big Tech sues Texas, says age-verification law is “broad censorship regime” Read More »

4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act

4chan, censorship, FCC, First Amendment, free speech, Kiwi Farms, Ofcom, online safety act, Policy, united kingdom / Mike M. / October 13, 2025

The risk assessments also seem to unconstitutionally compel speech, they argued, forcing them to share information and “potentially incriminate themselves on demand.” That conflicts with 4chan and Kiwi Farms’ Fourth Amendment rights, as well as “the right against self-incrimination and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution,” the suit says.

Additionally, “the First Amendment protects Plaintiffs’ right to permit anonymous use of their platforms,” 4chan and Kiwi Farms argued, opposing Ofcom’s requirements to verify ages of users. (This may be their weakest argument as the US increasingly moves to embrace age gates.)

4chan is hoping a US district court will intervene and ban enforcement of the OSA, arguing that the US must act now to protect all US companies. Failing to act now could be a slippery slope, as the UK is supposedly targeting “the most well-known, but small and, financially speaking, defenseless platforms” in the US before mounting attacks to censor “larger American companies,” 4chan and Kiwi Farms argued.

Ofcom has until November 25 to respond to the lawsuit and has maintained that the OSA is not a censorship law.

On Monday, Britain’s technology secretary, Liz Kendall, called OSA a “lifeline” meant to protect people across the UK “from the darkest corners of the Internet,” the Record reported.

“Services can no longer ignore illegal content, like encouraging self-harm or suicide, circulating online which can devastate young lives and leaves families shattered,” Kendall said. “This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material.”

Whether 4chan and Kiwi Farms can win their fight to create a carveout in the OSA for American companies remains unclear, but the Federal Trade Commission agrees that the UK law is an overreach. In August, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson warned US tech companies against complying with the OSA, claiming that censoring Americans to comply with UK law is a violation of the FTC Act, the Record reported.

“American consumers do not reasonably expect to be censored to appease a foreign power and may be deceived by such actions,” Ferguson told tech executives in a letter.

Another lawyer backing 4chan, Preston Byrne, seemed to echo Ferguson, telling the BBC, “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail.”

4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act Read More »

Is it illegal to not buy ads on X? Experts explain the FTC’s bizarre ad fight.

antitrust, elon musk x, federal trade commission, First Amendment, online advertising, Policy, twitter ad boycott, x ad boycott / Mike M. / August 22, 2025

Here’s the “least silly way” to wrap your head around the FTC’s war over X ads.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

After a judge warned that the Federal Trade Commission’s probe into Media Matters for America (MMFA) should alarm “all Americans”—viewing it as a likely government retaliation intended to silence critical reporting from a political foe—the FTC this week appealed a preliminary injunction blocking the investigation.

The Republican-led FTC’s determined to keep pressure on the nonprofit—which is dedicated to monitoring conservative misinformation—ever since Elon Musk villainized MMFA in 2023 for reporting that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X. Musk claims that reporting caused so many brands to halt advertising that X’s revenue dropped by $1.5 billion, but advertisers have suggested there technically was no boycott. They’ve said that many factors influenced each of their independent decisions to leave X—including their concerns about Musk’s own antisemitic post, which drew rebuke from the White House in 2023.

For MMFA, advertisers, agencies, and critics, a big question remains: Can the FTC actually penalize advertisers for invoking their own rights to free expression and association by refusing to deal with a private company just because they happened to agree on a collective set of brand standards to avoid monetizing hate speech or offensive content online?

You’re not alone if you’re confused by the suggestion, since advertisers have basically always cautiously avoided associations that could harm their brands. After Elon Musk sued MMFA—then quickly expanded the fight by also suing advertisers and agencies—a running social media joke mocked X as suing to force people to buy its products and the billionaire for seeming to believe it should be illegal to deprive him of money.

On a more serious note, former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who joined fellow Democrats who sued Trump for ejecting them from office, flagged the probe as appearing “bizarrely” politically motivated to protect Musk, an ally who donated $288 million to Trump’s campaign.

The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on its investigation. But seemingly backing Musk’s complaints without much evidence, the FTC continues to amplify his conspiracy theory that sharing brand safety standards harms competition in the ad industry. So far, the FTC has alleged that sharing such standards allows advertisers, ad buyers, and nonprofit advocacy groups to coordinate attacks on revenue streams in supposed bids to control ad markets and censor conservative platforms.

Legal experts told Ars that these claims seem borderline absurd. Antitrust claims usually arise out of concerns that collaborators are profiting by reducing competition, but it’s unclear how advertisers financially gain from withholding ads. Somewhat glaringly in the case of X, it seems likely that at least some advertisers actually increased costs by switching from buying cheaper ads on the increasingly toxic X to costlier platforms deemed safer or more in line with brands’ values.

X did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

The bizarre logic of the FTC’s ad investigation

In a blog post, Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, picked apart the conspiracy theory, trying to iron out the seemingly obvious constitutional conflicts with the FTC’s logic.

He explained that “X and Musk, together with allies in high government posts, have taken the position that for companies or ad agencies to decline to advertise with X on ideological grounds,” that “may legally violate its rights, especially if they coordinate with other entities in doing so.”

“Perhaps the least silly way of couching that idea is to say that advertisers are combining in restraint of trade to force [X] to improve the quality of its product as an ad environment, which you might analogize to forcing it to offer better terms to advertisers,” Olson said.

Pointing to a legal analysis weighing reasons why the FTC’s antitrust claims might not hold up in court, Olson suggested that the FTC is unlikely to overcome constitutional protections and win its ad war on the merits.

For one, he noted that it’s unusual to mingle “elements of anticompetitive conduct with First Amendment expression,” For another, “courts have been extremely protective of the right to boycott for ideological reasons, even when some effects were anti-competitive.” As Olson emphasized to Ars, courts are cautious that infringing First Amendment rights for even a brief period of time can irreparably harm speakers, including causing a chilling effect on speech broadly.

It seems particularly problematic that the FTC is attempting to block so-called boycotts from advertisers and agencies that “are specifically deciding how to spend money on speech itself,” Olson wrote. He noted that “the decision to advertise, the rejection of a platform for ideological reasons, and communication with others on how to turn these speech decisions into a maximum statement are all forms of expression on matters of public concern.”

Olson agrees with critics who suspect that the FTC doesn’t care about winning legal battles in this war. Instead, experts from Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group partly funded by big tech companies, told Ars that, seemingly for the FTC, “capitulation is the point.”

Why Media Matters’ fight may matter most

Public Knowledge Policy Director Lisa Macpherson told Ars that “the investigation into Media Matters is part of a larger pattern” employed by the FTC, which uses “the technical concepts of antitrust to further other goals, which are related to information control on behalf of the Trump administration.”

As one example, she joined Public Knowledge’s policy counsel focused on competition, Elise Phillips, in criticizing the FTC for introducing “unusual terms” into a merger that would create the world’s biggest advertising agency. To push the merger through, ad agencies were asked to sign a consent agreement that would block them from “boycotting platforms because of their political content by refusing to place their clients’ advertisements on them.”

Like social media users poking fun at Musk and X, it struck Public Knowledge as odd that the FTC “appears to be demanding that these ad agencies—and by extension, their clients—support media channels that may spread disinformation, hate speech, and extreme content as a condition for a merger.”

“The specific scope of the consent order seems to indicate that it does not reflect focus on the true impacts of diminished ad buying competition on advertisers, consumers, or labor, but instead the political impact of decreased revenue flows to publishers hosting content favorable to the Trump administration,” Public Knowledge experts suggested.

The demand falls in line with other Trump administration efforts to control information, Public Knowledge said, such as the FCC requiring a bias monitor for CBS to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger. It’s “all in service of controlling the flow of information about the administration and its policies,” Public Knowledge suggested. And the Trump administration depending on “the lack of a legal challenge due to industry financial interests” is creating “the biggest risk to First Amendment protections right now,” Phillips said.

Olson agreed with Public Knowledge experts that the agencies likely could have fought to remove the terms as unconstitutional and won, but instead, the CEO of the acquiring agency, Omnicom, appeared to indicate that the company was willing to accept the terms to push the merger through.

It seems possible that Omnicom didn’t challenge the terms because they represent what Public Knowledge suggested in a subsequent blog was the FTC’s fundamental misunderstanding of how ad placements work online. Due to the opaque nature of ad tech like Google’s, advertisers started depending on ad agencies to set brand safety standards to help protect their ad placements (the ad tech was ruled anti-competitive, and the Department of Justice is currently figuring out how to remedy market harms). But even as they adapted to an opaque ad environment, advertisers, not their agencies, have always maintained control over where ads are placed.

Even if Omnicom felt that the FTC terms simply maintained the status quo—as the FTC suggested it would—Public Knowledge noted that Omnicom missed an opportunity to challenge how the terms impacted “the agency’s rights of association and perfectly legal, independent refusals to deal by private companies.” The seeming capitulation could “cause a chilling effect” not just impacting placements from Omnicom’s advertiser clients but also those at other ad agencies, Public Knowledge’s experts suggested.

That sticks advertisers in a challenging spot where the FTC seemingly hopes to keep them squirming, experts suggested. Without agencies to help advise on whether certain ad placements may risk harming their brands, advertisers who don’t want their “stuff to be shown against Nazis” are “going to have to figure out how” to tackle brand safety on their own, Public Knowledge’s blog said. And as long as the ad industry is largely willing to bend to the FTC’s pressure campaign, it’s less likely that legal challenges will be raised to block what appears to be the quiet erosion of First Amendment protections, experts fear.

That may be why the Media Matters fight, which seems like just another front with a tangential player in the FTC’s bigger battle, may end up mattering the most. Whereas others directly involved in the ad industry may be tempted to make a deal like Omnicon’s to settle litigation, MMFA refuses to capitulate to Musk or the FTC, vowing to fight both battles to the bitter end.

“It has been a recurring strategy of the Trump administration to pile up the pressure on targets so that they cannot afford to hold out for vindication at trial, even if their chances there seem good,” Olson told Ars. “So they settle.”

It’s harder than usual in today’s political climate to predict the outcome of the FTC’s appeal, Olson told Ars. Macpherson told Ars she’s holding out hope “that the DC court would take the same position that the current judge did,” which is that “this is likely vindictive behavior on the part of the FTC and that, importantly, advertisers’ First Amendment rights should make the FTC’s sweeping investigation invalid.”

Perhaps the FTC’s biggest hurdle, apart from the First Amendment, may be a savvy judges who see through their seeming pressure campaign. In a notable 1995 case, a US judge, Richard Posner, “took the view that a realistic court should be ready to recognize instances where litigation can be employed to generate intense pressure on targets to settle regardless of the merits,” Olson said.

While that case involved targets of litigation, the appeals court judge—or even the Supreme Court if MMFA’s case gets that far—could rule that “targets of investigation could be under similar pressure,” Olson suggested.

In a statement to Ars, MMFA President Angelo Carusone confirmed that MMFA’s resolve has not faded in the face of the FTC’s appeal and was instead only strengthened by the US district judge being “crystal clear” that “FTC’s wide-ranging fishing expedition was a ‘retaliatory act’ that ‘should alarm all Americans.'”

“We will continue to fight this blatant attack on our First Amendment rights because if this Administration succeeds, so can any Administration target anyone who disagrees,” Carusone said. “The law here is clear, and we are optimistic that the Circuit Court will see through this appeal for what it is: an attempt to do an end run around constitutional law in an effort to silence political critics.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Is it illegal to not buy ads on X? Experts explain the FTC’s bizarre ad fight. Read More »

Skydance deal allows Trump’s FCC to “censor speech” and “silence dissent” on CBS

brendan carr, CBS, dei, Donald Trump, FCC, First Amendment, freedom of the press, paramount, Policy, sky dance / Kris Guyer / July 27, 2025

Warning that the “Paramount payout” and “reckless” acquisition approval together mark a “dark chapter” for US press freedom, Gomez suggested the FCC’s approval will embolden “those who believe the government can—and should—abuse its power to extract financial and ideological concessions, demand favored treatment, and secure positive media coverage.”

FCC terms also govern Skydance hiring decisions

Gomez further criticized the FCC for overstepping its authority in “intervening in employment matters reserved for other government entities with proper jurisdiction on these issues” by requiring Skydance commitments to not establish any DEI programs, which Carr derided as “invidious.” But Gomez countered that “this agency is undermining legitimate efforts to combat discrimination and expand opportunity” by meddling in private companies’ employment decisions.

Ultimately, commissioner Olivia Trusty joined Carr in voting to stamp the agency’s approval, celebrating the deal as “lawful” and a “win” for American “jobs” and “storytelling.” Carr suggested the approval would bolster Paramount’s programming by injecting $1.5 billion into operations, which Trusty said would help Paramount “compete with dominant tech platforms.”

Gomez conceded that she was pleased that at least—unlike the Verizon/T-Mobile merger—Carr granted her request to hold a vote, rather than burying “the outcome of backroom negotiations” and “granting approval behind closed doors, under the cover of bureaucratic process.”

“The public has a right to know how Paramount’s capitulation evidences an erosion of our First Amendment protections,” Gomez said.

Outvoted 2–1, Gomez urged “companies, journalists, and citizens” to take up the fight and push back on the Trump administration, emphasizing that “unchecked and unquestioned power has no rightful place in America.”

Skydance deal allows Trump’s FCC to “censor speech” and “silence dissent” on CBS Read More »

X sues to block copycat NY content moderation law after California win

censorship, content moderation, elon musk, First Amendment, hate speech, new york, Policy, Social Media, Twitter, X, x corp / Rejus Almole / June 18, 2025

“It is our sincere belief that the current social media landscape makes it far too easy for bad actors to promote false claims, hatred and dangerous conspiracies online, and some large social media companies are not able or willing to regulate this hate speech themselves,” the letter said.

Although the letter acknowledged that X was not the only platform targeted by the law, the lawmakers further noted that Musk taking over Twitter spiked hateful and harmful content on the platform. They said it seemed “clear to us that X needs to provide greater transparency for their moderation policies and we believe that our law, as written, will do that.”

This clearly aggravated X. In their complaint, X alleged that the letter made it clear that New York’s law was “tainted by viewpoint discriminatory motives”—alleging that the lawmakers were biased against X and Musk.

X seeks injunction in New York

Just as X alleged in the California lawsuit, the social media company has claimed that the New York law forces X “to make politically charged disclosures about content moderation” in order to “generate public controversy about content moderation in a way that will pressure social media companies, such as X Corp., to restrict, limit, disfavor, or censor certain constitutionally protected content on X that the State dislikes,” X alleged.

“These forced disclosures violate the First Amendment” and the New York constitution, X alleged, and the content categories covered in the disclosures “were taken word-for-word” from California’s enjoined law.

X is arguing that New York has no compelling interest, or any legitimate interest at all, in applying “pressure” to govern social media platforms’ content moderation choices. Because X faces penalties up to $15,000 per day per violation, the company has asked for a jury to grant an injunction blocking enforcement of key provisions of the law.

“Deciding what content should appear on a social media platform is a question that engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” X’s complaint said. “This is not a role that the government may play.”

X sues to block copycat NY content moderation law after California win Read More »

FCC Democrat slams chairman for aiding Trump’s “campaign of censorship”

FCC, fcc news distortion, First Amendment, Policy / Kris Guyer / April 24, 2025

The first event is scheduled for Thursday and will be hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology. The events will be open to the public and livestreamed when possible, and feature various speakers on free speech, media, and telecommunications issues.

With Democrat Geoffrey Starks planning to leave the commission soon, Republicans will gain a 2–1 majority, and Gomez is set to be the only Democrat on the FCC for at least a while. Carr is meanwhile pursuing news distortion investigations into CBS and ABC, and he has threatened Comcast with a similar probe into its subsidiary NBC.

Gomez’s press release criticized Carr for these and other actions. “From investigating broadcasters for editorial decisions in their newsrooms, to harassing private companies for their fair hiring practices, to threatening tech companies that respond to consumer demand for fact-checking tools, the FCC’s actions have focused on weaponizing the agency’s authority to silence critics,” Gomez’s office said.

Gomez previously criticized Carr for reviving news distortion complaints that were dismissed shortly before Trump’s inauguration. “We cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press,” she said at the time.

FCC Democrat slams chairman for aiding Trump’s “campaign of censorship” Read More »

Harvard sues to block government funding cuts

First Amendment, Harvard, lawsuit, Policy, research funding, Science, Title VI, trump administration / Paul Patrick / April 23, 2025

The suit also claims that the funding hold, made in retaliation for Harvard’s letter announcing its refusal to accept these conditions, punishes Harvard for exercising free speech.

Separately, the lawsuit focuses on Title VI, part of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits the government from funding organizations that engage in racial discrimination. It’s Harvard’s alleged tolerance for antisemitism that would enable the government to put a hold on these funds. But the suit spells out the requirements for cutting funding—hearings, a 30-day waiting period, notification of Congress—that the law requires before funding can be cut. And, quite obviously, the government has done none of them.

Harvard also alleges that the government’s decision to hold research funds is arbitrary and capricious: “The Government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen.”

Finally, the court is asked to consider an issue that’s central to a lot of the questions regarding Trump Administration actions: Can the executive branch stop the flow of money that was allocated by Congress? “Defendants do not have any inherent authority to terminate or freeze appropriated federal funding,” the suit claims.

Remedies

The suit seeks various remedies. It wants the government’s actions declared illegal, the freeze order vacated, and prohibitions put in place that will prevent the government from accomplishing the freeze through some other means. Harvard would also like any further reactions to allegations of antisemitism to follow the procedures mandated by Title VI and to have the government cover its attorney’s fees.

It also wants the ruling expedited, given the potential for damage to university-hosted research. The suit was filed in the District of Massachusetts, which is the same venue that has been used for other suits seeking to restrain the Trump administration’s attack on federally funded research. So far, those have resulted in rapid responses and injunctions that have put damaging funding cuts on hold. So, there’s a good chance we’ll see something similar here.

Harvard sues to block government funding cuts Read More »

TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, First Amendment, free speech, national security, Online speech, Policy, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / Paul Patrick / January 17, 2025

TikTok has said it’s preparing to shut down Sunday.

A TikTok influencer holds a sign that reads “Keep TikTok” outside the US Supreme Court Building as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Stringer | Getty Images News

TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration’s divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down” and “essentially… stop operating.” On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok’s claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans’ free speech rights did not supersede the government’s compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

“We conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” the SCOTUS opinion said, while acknowledging that “there is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community.”

Late last year, TikTok and its owner, the Chinese-owned company ByteDance, urgently pushed SCOTUS to intervene before the law’s January 19 enforcement date. Ahead of SCOTUS’ decision, TikTok warned it would have no choice but to abruptly shut down a thriving platform where many Americans get their news, express their views, and make a living.

The US had argued the law was necessary to protect national security interests as the US-China trade war intensifies, alleging that China could use the app to track and influence TikTok’s 170 million American users. A lower court had agreed that the US had a compelling national security interest and rejected arguments that the law violated the First Amendment, triggering TikTok’s appeal to SCOTUS. Today, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

According to SCOTUS, the divest-or-sell law is “content-neutral” and only triggers intermediate scrutiny. That requires that the law doesn’t burden “substantially more speech than necessary” to serve the government’s national security interests, rather than strict scrutiny which would force the government to protect those interests through the least restrictive means.

Further, the government was right to single TikTok out, SCOTUS wrote, due to its “scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects.”

“Preventing China from collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million US TikTok users” is a “decidedly content agnostic” rationale, justices wrote.

“The Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment,” the opinion said.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted a statement on TikTok reacting to the ruling, thanking Trump for committing to “work with TikTok” to avoid a shut down and telling users to “rest assured, we will do everything in our power to ensure our platform thrives” in the US.

Momentum to ban TikTok has shifted

First Amendment advocates condemned the SCOTUS ruling. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “major blow to freedom of expression online,” and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene accused justices of sweeping “past the undisputed content-based justification for the law” to “rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns.”

While the SCOTUS ruling was unanimous, justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “precedent leaves no doubt” that the law implicated the First Amendment and “plainly” imposed a burden on any US company that distributes TikTok’s speech and any content creator who preferred TikTok as a publisher of their speech.

Similarly concerned was justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote in his concurring opinion that he harbors “serious reservations about whether the law before us is ‘content neutral’ and thus escapes ‘strict scrutiny.'” Gorsuch also said he didn’t know “whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends.”

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality,” Gorsuch wrote. “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional.”

For TikTok and content creators defending the app, the stakes were incredibly high. TikTok repeatedly denied there was any evidence of spying and warned that enforcing the law would allow the government to unlawfully impose “a massive and unprecedented speech restriction.”

But the Supreme Court declined to order a preliminary injunction to block the law until Trump took office, instead deciding to rush through oral arguments and reach a decision prior to the law’s enforcement deadline. Now TikTok has little recourse if it wishes to maintain US operations, as justices suggested during the trial that even if a president chose to not enforce the law, providing access to TikTok or enabling updates could be viewed as too risky for app stores or other distributors.

The law at the center of the case—the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—had strong bipartisan support under the Biden administration.

But President-elect Donald Trump said he opposed a TikTok ban, despite agreeing that US national security interests in preventing TikTok spying on or manipulating Americans were compelling. And this week, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to extend the deadline ahead of a potential TikTok ban, and a top Trump adviser, Congressman Mike Waltz, has said that Trump plans to stop the ban and “keep TikTok from going dark,” the BBC reported. Even the Biden administration, whose justice department just finished arguing why the US needed to enforce the law to SCOTUS, “is considering ways to keep TikTok available,” sources told NBC News.

“What might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch noted in the opinion.

Will Trump save TikTok?

It will likely soon be clear whether Trump will intervene. Trump filed a brief in December, requesting that the Supreme Court stay enforcement of the law until after he takes office because allegedly only he could make a deal to save TikTok. He criticized SCOTUS for rushing the decision and suggested that Congress’ passage of the law may have been “legislative encroachment” that potentially “binds his hands” as president.

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

TikTok’s CEO Chew signaled to users that Trump is expected to step in.

“On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” Chew’s statement said.

Chew also reminded Trump that he has 60 billion views of his content on TikTok and perhaps stands to lose a major platform through the ban.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives,” Chew said.

Trump seemingly has limited options to save TikTok, Forbes suggested. At trial, justices disagreed on whether Trump could legally decide to simply not enforce the law. And efforts to pause enforcement or claim compliance without evidence that ByteDance is working on selling off TikTok could be blocked by the court, analysts said. And while ByteDance has repeatedly said it’s unwilling to sell TikTok US, it’s possible, one analyst suggested to Forbes, that ByteDance might be more willing to divest “in exchange for Trump backing off his threat of high tariffs on Chinese imports.”

On Tuesday, a Bloomberg report suggested that China was considering whether selling TikTok to Elon Musk might be a good bargaining chip to de-escalate Trump’s attacks in the US-China trade war.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday Read More »

Texas defends requiring ID for porn to SCOTUS: “We’ve done this forever”

age verification law, age-gating, First Amendment, free speech rights, Policy, pornography, privacy online, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, texas / Paul Patrick / January 15, 2025

“You can use VPNs, the click of a button, to make it seem like you’re not in Texas,” Shaffer argued. “You can go through the search engines, you can go through social media, you can access the same content in the ways that kids are likeliest to do.”

Texas attorney Aaron Nielson argued that the problem of kids accessing porn online has only gotten “worse” in the decades since Texas has been attempting less restrictive and allegedly less effective means like content filtering. Now, age verification is Texas’ preferred solution, and strict scrutiny shouldn’t apply to a law that just asks someone to show ID to see adult content, Nielson argued.

“In our history we have always said kids can’t come and look at this stuff,” Nielson argued. “So it seems not correct to me as a historical matter to say, well actually it’s always been presumptively unconstitutional. … But we’ve done it forever. Strict scrutiny somehow has always been satisfied.”

Like groups suing, Texas also asked the Supreme Court to be very clear when writing guidance for the 5th Circuit should the court vacate and remand the case. But Texas wants justices to reiterate that just because the case was remanded, that doesn’t mean the 5th Circuit can’t reinstitute the stay on the preliminary injunction that was ordered following the 5th Circuit’s prior review.

On rebuttal, Shaffer told SCOTUS that out of “about 20 other laws that by some views may look a lot like Texas'” law, “this is the worst of them.” He described Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a “hostile regulator who’s saying to adults, you should not be here.”

“I strongly urge this court to stick with strict scrutiny as the applicable standard of review when we’re talking about content-based burdens on speakers,” Shaffer said.

In a press release, Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that “efforts to childproof the Internet not only hurt everyone’s ability to access information, but often give the government far too much leeway to go after speech it doesn’t like—all while failing to actually protect children.”

Texas defends requiring ID for porn to SCOTUS: “We’ve done this forever” Read More »

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, First Amendment, free speech, online censorship, Policy, social media censorship, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / Kris Guyer / December 30, 2024

Several members of Congress— Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—filed a brief agreeing that “the TikTok ban does not survive First Amendment scrutiny.” They agreed with TikTok that the law is “illegitimate.”

Lawmakers’ “principle justification” for the ban—”preventing covert content manipulation by the Chinese government”—masked a “desire” to control TikTok content, they said. Further, it could be achieved by a less-restrictive alternative, they said, a stance which TikTok has long argued for.

Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Act, though, urging SCOTUS to remain laser-focused on the question of whether a forced sale of TikTok that would seemingly allow the app to continue operating without impacting American free speech violates the First Amendment. If the court agrees that the law survives strict scrutiny, TikTok could still be facing an abrupt shutdown in January.

The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments to begin on January 10. TikTok and content creators who separately sued to block the law have asked for their arguments to be divided, so that the court can separately weigh “different perspectives” when deciding how to approach the First Amendment question.

In its own brief, TikTok has asked SCOTUS to strike the portions of the law singling out TikTok or “at the very least” explain to Congress that “it needed to do far better work either tailoring the Act’s restrictions or justifying why the only viable remedy was to prohibit Petitioners from operating TikTok.”

But that may not be necessary if Trump prevails. Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok Read More »

Supreme Court to decide if TikTok should be banned or sold

bytedance, china, First Amendment, free speech, Policy, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / Rejus Almole / December 18, 2024

While the controversial US law doesn’t necessarily ban TikTok, it does seem designed to make TikTok “go away,” Greene said, and such a move to interfere with a widely used communications platform seems “unprecedented.”

“The TikTok ban itself and the DC Circuit’s approval of it should be of great concern even to those who find TikTok undesirable or scary,” Greene said in a statement. “Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.”

Greene further warned that the US “cutting off a tool used by 170 million Americans to receive information and communicate with the world, without proving with evidence that the tools are presently seriously harmful” would “greatly” lower “well-established standards for restricting freedom of speech in the US.”

TikTok partly appears to be hoping that President-elect Donald Trump will disrupt enforcement of the law, but Greene said it remains unclear if Trump’s plan to “save TikTok” might just be a plan to support a sale to a US buyer. At least one former Trump ally, Steven Mnuchin, has reportedly expressed interest in buying the app.

For TikTok, putting pressure on Trump will likely be the next step, “if the Supreme Court ever says, ‘we agree the law is valid,'” Greene suggested.

“Then that’s it,” Greene said. “There’s no other legal recourse. You only have political recourses.”

Like other civil rights groups, the EFF plans to remain on TikTok’s side as the SCOTUS battle starts.

“We are pleased that the Supreme Court will take the case and will urge the justices to apply the appropriately demanding First Amendment scrutiny,” Greene said.

Supreme Court to decide if TikTok should be banned or sold Read More »