|
||
|
First Amendment · Section 230 · AI Liability Nerdy Skynet! April 21, 2026 |
||
|
Coverage: 2026-04-17 through 2026-04-21 · 1 new development this period |
||
|
||
|
Techdirt |
||
|
Oh Look, The MAGA FTC Built The Censorship Industrial Complex It Was Screaming About Techdirt · 2026-04-17 CommentaryThe post covers the FTC's campaign — joined by eight state attorneys general — to pressure all five major advertising holding companies into cutting ties with NewsGuard, a journalism ratings service, by conditioning merger approvals and pursuing antitrust enforcement against brand-safety industry standards. The post frames this as a classic jawboning/government coercion case directly analogous to NRA v. Vullo and Backpage v. Dart: the government is using regulatory and enforcement leverage to force private commercial actors to sever economic relationships with a speaker whose opinions disfavored political allies find inconvenient. This is squarely within the newsletter's government-coercion/jawboning subcategory, raising core First Amendment questions about whether antitrust law can be weaponized to achieve speech suppression that direct censorship could not. Key point: The FTC's use of antitrust enforcement and merger conditions to coerce the entire major advertising industry into blacklisting a journalism ratings service represents a textbook jawboning scenario that, under NRA v. Vullo and Bantam Books, would appear to violate the First Amendment — an irony the post underscores given the same political coalition's prior invocations of those precedents. |
||
|
Sources: CourtListener API ·
All 13 federal circuit RSS feeds ·
All 50 state supreme courts + intermediate appellate courts (8 states)
via Justia ·
Eric Goldman · Techdirt |