Public Fora Purpose: Analyzing Viewpoint Discrimination on the President’s Twitter Account

Today, protectable speech takes many forms in many spaces. This Note is about the spaces. This Note discusses whether President Donald J. Trump’s personal Twitter account functions as a public forum, and if so, whether blocking constituents from said account amounts to viewpoint discrimination—a First Amendment freedom of speech violation. Part I introduces the core legal devices and doctrines that have developed in freedom of speech jurisprudence relating to issues of public fora. Part II analyzes whether social media generally serves as public fora, whether the President’s personal Twitter account is a public forum, and whether his recent habit of blocking constituents from that account amounts to viewpoint discrimination. In doing so, Part II also addresses the applicability of the recent decision from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Davison v. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors—wherein a local county government official was held to have engaged in viewpoint discrimination for banning a constituent from her personal social media account—to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University’s pending case against the President for the same. Part III then suggests multiple approaches for courts to analyze these claims, while taking account of an analytical mismatch that occurs when trying to apply the Davison case to the case brought against the President

The State of the Parties (Sixth Edition)

Every four years, The State of the Parties brings readers up to date on party action in election years and in between. With the dual themes of continuity and change characterizing the new edition, this essential party primer includes: three new chapters on party roles in the 2008 election, a section on the impact of party resources for the campaign, extensive coverage of party mobilization efforts via the Internet and local activity, and new chapters covering topics ranging from Republicans\u27 fall from grace to party governance under Nancy Pelosi to President Obama\u27s role in party politics.https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/state_of_the_parties6/1000/thumbnail.jp

Gender and sexualities in the European far-right political discourse

In the past decades there has been considerate advances of political far-right parties in Europe. Some far-right populist parties have strengthened their political position among youth, the working class, women and gay-and-lesbian rights people in the recent electoral moments by including gender issues and ‘sexual emancipation’ in their political programmes and public discourses. They have been progressing towards a new type of nationalism in which women’s rights and sexual minorities’ rights support are seen as advanced and progressive in opposition of immigrant communities, particularly from Muslim countries. This dissertation aims to explore the use of gender and gay-and-lesbian issues through a qualitative analysis of anti-Islam political documents and speeches used by far-right parties in France (Rassemblement National/Front National) and The Netherlands (The Party for Freedom), where gender and sexual minorities issues have been explicitly visible in their political discourse in recent years.Nas últimas décadas, têm-se observado avanços de partidos políticos de extremadireita na Europa. Alguns partidos populistas de extrema-direita nos momentos eleitorais mais recentes têm fortalecido a sua posição política entre os jovens, trabalhadores, mulheres e pessoas gay e lésbicas, incluindo as questões de género e de "emancipação sexual" nos seus programas e discursos políticos. Os partidos em questão têm progredido em direção a um novo tipo de nacionalismo no qual os direitos das mulheres e o apoio aos direitos das minorias sexuais são vistos como progressistas em oposição às comunidades de imigrantes, particularmente vindas de países muçulmanos. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo explorar a utilização das questões de género e das pessoas gay e lésbicas através de uma análise qualitativa de documentos e discursos políticos anti-islão, usados pelos partidos de extrema-direita na França (Rassemblement National/Front National) e nos Países Baixos (The Party for Freedom), onde as questões de género e das minorias sexuais têm sido explicitamente visíveis

Words We Fear: Burning Tweets & the Politics of Incitement

The United States government has long wrestled with the link between speech and violence, periodically employing speculative claims of potential violence and law-breaking to suppress political speech in times of national insecurity. By the late 1960s, however, the Supreme Court fully operationalized the First Amendment’s premise that most government speech suppression is antithetical to self-government, individual autonomy, equality, and liberty. The Court therefore, required immediacy of potential violence before the government could punish speech advocating such illegality, but left private actors free to censor and suppress speech. Today, social media companies, at the behest of the government, are doing what the government cannot. This symposium article draws attention to continued congressional pressure on private companies to suppress social media speech that Congress itself cannot restrict because the speech involved—online terrorist extremist propaganda and recruitment—has no imminent link to violence or other law-breaking. Concern regarding such speech is warranted, given links between such speech and senseless murders. Yet the official characterization of protected expression as a viral transmitter of a social media-spread contagion of violence has translated into state suppression by proxy. Pressured by the government, private social media companies have banned large swaths of speech linked to political expression on their platforms. This article highlights this phenomenon of American state suppression by proxy. This largely descriptive symposium piece also poses, without answering, the question of whether this private speech regulation carries the same normative risks as government suppression. Does lowering the high constitutional bar that protects potentially dangerous but currently lawful speech risk degrading deliberative democratic self-government by limiting expression of politically-valuable speec

Political Issue or Public Health: the Vaccination Debate on Twitter in Europe

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this study, we examine whether there is a relationship between the political interest of social media users and their exposure to vaccine-hesitant content on Twitter. We focus on 17 European countries using a multilingual, longitudinal dataset of tweets spanning the period before COVID, up to the vaccine roll-out. We find that, in most countries, users' exposure to vaccine-hesitant content is the highest in the early months of the pandemic, around the time of greatest scientific uncertainty. Further, users who follow politicians from right-wing parties, and those associated with authoritarian or anti-EU stances are more likely to be exposed to vaccine-hesitant content, whereas those following left-wing politicians, more pro-EU or liberal parties, are less likely to encounter it. Somewhat surprisingly, politicians did not play an outsized role in the vaccine debates of their countries, receiving a similar number of retweets as other similarly popular users. This systematic, multi-country, longitudinal investigation of the connection of politics with vaccine hesitancy has important implications for public health policy and communication.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure