Tag

1st Amendment

Articles and publications tagged 1st Amendment across the Atmosphere.

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Articles

Publications

TechdirtOct 14, 2026

MAGA Built The Censorship Machine It Spent Years Falsely Accusing Democrats Of Building

This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We've certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump's myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and...

1st amendmentcensorship industrial complex

TechdirtOct 14, 2026

Court Filings Show DHS Is Collecting Info On Protesters, Feeding It To Palantir

More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters. Just a few months ago, "Immigration Czar" Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements...

1st amendmentdhs

TechdirtOct 13, 2026

Trump Bans CNN, Then Has DOJ Investigate CNN For Not Covering Him

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves... and then sued them (unsuccessfully) for not advertising on his personal propaganda and manipulation site? Well, it appears that Donald Trump is trying a government-backed variation on that abusive power play: claiming that news networks choosing not to cover him after he announced he was...

1st amendmentantitrust

TechdirtOct 13, 2026

Jury Convicts Ohio Blogger Of Harassment For Sending A Naked Shrek Pic To A Local Politician

In today's episode of "wtf," we have a jury deciding a local blogger is a criminal because a local politician didn't appreciate being sent a Shrek bereft of clothes to his cell phone. Morgan Trau of the Ohio Capital Journal has the (pathetic) details on this particular miscarriage of justice. An Ohio political blogger let...

1st amendmentabuse of power

TechdirtOct 9, 2026

Alabama’s TikTok Settlement Comes With An Affiliate Program For Getting Other AGs To Go After TikTok

The big Meta multi-state settlement got most of the headlines, and there's been plenty of discussion about how it's a bad deal for kids and pretty clearly anti-competitive. That's thanks to a very strange clause that encourages Meta to make its own required feature changes the "industry standard" by convincing other platforms to cut similar...

1st amendmentalabama

TechdirtOct 8, 2026

FBI Whistleblower Says Emil Bove Directed Agents To Investigate Anti-ICE Protesters

Hey, this guy is a judge now! Let that seep in for a bit. Emil Bove used to work for the DOJ. Then he went to work for Trump, acting as his personal lawyer starting in 2023. Upon Trump's return to office, he was brought back to the DOJ to serve as an "associate deputy...

1st amendmentemil bove

TechdirtOct 6, 2026

Appeals Court Pauses Minnesota’s Nudify Law, Which Ignored Its Own Supreme Court’s Roadmap.

I feel I need to start out posts like this by reminding anyone that nudification apps are bad. They're almost exclusively used to abuse and harass people, most often women. That said, if you're going to ban them legally, you can't just say "nudification apps are illegal." That's not how the First Amendment works. And,...

1st amendment8th circuit

TechdirtOct 5, 2026

States Prosecuting Platforms For Being Platforms? Section 230 Is Supposed To Avoid This Mess, We Reminded A Court

The other day the Copia Institute filed an amicus brief at the Fourth Circuit in a case involving West Virginia attempting to punish Apple for not filtering CSAM the way it thinks it should. The issue raised in the appeal was in some respects a narrow one: could Apple cause the case West Virginia brought...

1st amendment4th amendment

TechdirtOct 2, 2026

Bricks & Minifigs Really Doesn’t Want You To Know About The BAM Map, Sues To Unmask Whoever Runs It

A few days ago I wrote about the anti-SLAPP motion filed by "Reckless" Ben Schneider against Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) over the ridiculous RICO suit they filed against him for his efforts to get BAM to pay back the money owed to Bryan Mansell. The original suit was based on the laughable claim that...

1st amendmentammon mcneff

TechdirtSep 30, 2026

Texas Officials Disband Local Cop Shop For Failing To ‘Provide Any Benefit To The Community’

"Defund the police" has come for at least one local law enforcement agency in one of the reddest states in the nation. This police department could have avoided this ignominious fate simply by not being generally awful. But the person leading the now-defunct department couldn't seem to do his job without violating rights on the...

1st amendmentcharles gregory

TechdirtSep 28, 2026

Trump Orders The FCC To Punish A Reporter. Where Did All The ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Screamers Go?

Remember the Disinformation Governance Board? As we were quick to point out, this organization was named in the dumbest possible way by some incompetent people within the Biden administration, which only fed into the [ahem] disinformation around it. The program, a part of DHS, was an advisory group with no enforcement capabilities, and was tasked...

1st amendmentbari weiss

TechdirtSep 26, 2026

DC Circuit OK’s Hegseth’s Abuse Of A Crummy Statute To Punish AI Vendors Who Won’t Give Him The Deadly Toys He Wants

Pete Hegseth and Trump got a dubious win today: a 2-1 panel of the DC Circuit found that the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was not unlawful. It dismissed Anthropic's challenge despite (1) a different court having found the exact opposite not that long ago; (2) being predicated on a statutory interpretation...

1st amendmentdefense department

TechdirtSep 25, 2026

Judge Blocks White House Press Ban; White House Spends Thursday Testing How Much Of The Court Order It Can Violate

On Monday we wrote about Donald Trump's direct attack on the First Amendment and the free press by banning reporters from the White House. As we expected, a judge on Thursday morning issued a Temporary Restraining Order, blocking the White House from continuing this unconstitutional action, though (as happened the last time Trump tried this)...

1st amendmentdonald trump

TechdirtSep 24, 2026

Trump Easily Loses His Censorial SLAPP Suit Over A Poll Predicting He Might Lose

You may recall that after he had won the 2024 Presidential election, the sorest winner in the history of sore winners, Donald Trump sued retiring pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for... having reported the — admittedly surprising and, in retrospect, wildly off — poll results suggesting that Kamala Harris actually had a...

1st amendmentann selzer

TechdirtSep 21, 2026

“Free Speech” President Admits He’s “Banning The Free Press” From The White House

Apparently autumn is when President Donald Trump feels free to admit to his anti-free speech, anti-free press ways. For a guy who constantly lied about being in support of free speech, despite regularly suing people and news organizations for their speech, he's been remarkably willing to admit to wanting to abuse power to suppress speech...

1st amendmentcensorship

TechdirtSep 18, 2026

Desperate DHS Demanded Info On Beanie Cap Buyers While Trying To Prosecute Journalists

Some day we'll look back at this and laugh. I mean, I would hope so. The DOJ and DHS are still trying to put people in jail for protesting a church whose pastor was also an ICE officer. Ultimately, the protesters entered the church and disrupted the service. Among those entering the church were a...

1st amendment4th amendment

TechdirtSep 18, 2026

Court Tells Imran Ahmed His First Amendment Claim May Be Real, Just Not Reviewable.

Well, this is unfortunate. Late last year, Marco Rubio's State Department declared that it had banned five people from entering the US because of their speech. Most of them work, in one way or another, on fighting hate speech online, including Imran Ahmed, the head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). As I've...

1st amendmentdue process

TechdirtSep 16, 2026

Court: The First Amendment Allows You To Tell The ICE Director He’s A ‘Sad, Despised Man’

You may recall that back in July we had the ridiculous story of how ICE decided to go all gestapo on its critics, including tracking down and threatening David Streever, who had emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons back in January, after federal agents killed some peaceful protestors in Minnesota. Streever's email was pretty straightforward:...

1st amendmentcriticism

TechdirtSep 15, 2026

Minneapolis ICE Observer Sues DHS For Its Retaliatory Stripping Of His Global Entry Status

The lowest common denominator administration continues to roll. It doesn't care what's legal or what's proper. It just does what it wants because the shittiest people are in it and its basest of voter bases will feverishly clap their sweaty hands together in applause whenever it does whatever it wants to do. It will be...

1st amendmentcbp

TechdirtSep 9, 2026

Judge: Losing Your First Amendment Rights Is No Longer “Irreparable” If You Take Almost Three Months To Sue

Here we go again: another case where it's easy to cheer a court ruling against Elon Musk, and unfortunately easy to miss the much more important underlying point — which the judge clearly did. In July, we wrote about how even as awful as Elon Musk is, and as awful as it was that (with...

1st amendmentdonovan frank

TechdirtSep 1, 2026

Trump Demands FCC Punish Media Companies For His Sagging Polling

Our full-diapered mad king is at it again, this time urging FCC boss Brendan Carr to go after media companies for the crime of....simply pointing out his terrible, crashing polling numbers: Trump last week also posted a long, rambling screed on his personal propaganda website, vowing that NBC News‘ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker...

1st amendmentbrendan carr

TechdirtAug 28, 2026

Pete Hegseth And His Department Of Unconstitutional Revenge Lose Again In California

When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn't agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win. While the previous...

1st amendmentadministrative procedure act

TechdirtAug 24, 2026

Trump Threatens Think Tank With Libel Lawsuit For Telling The Truth About National Guard Deployments

Whenever Trump doesn't like the facts, he calls it "fake news" or does what he's doing here: tries to shoot the messenger by threatening them with a lawsuit. The administration has been sending National Guard troops to various US cities ever since it became clear its mass deportation efforts weren't nearly as popular with US...

1st amendmentalejandro brito

TechdirtAug 19, 2026

Marion County, Kansas Has Racked Up $4 Million In Settlements Since It Raided A Local Paper’s Office

Sure, the town's insurance will pay most of this, but it's probably fair to say most of this small county's population (11,823 at last count) wasn't supportive of local law enforcement's decision to violate as much of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as possible in the apparent hopes of making one local business owner...

1st amendment4th amendment