Civic Engagement

[Commentary] I have been teaching First Amendment law to law students and undergraduates for more than 37 years. I have also litigated free speech cases, including at the Supreme Court. I believe that Chancellor Christ and the campus have done a superb job of adhering to the First Amendment, protecting free speech while ensuring the safety of students, staff, and faculty. But it’s also become clear to me that current college students are often ambivalent, or even hostile, to the idea of free speech on campus.

Robert Post’s premise is undoubtedly correct: Universities must evaluate the content of faculty and student work. But it does not follow that outside of this realm, free speech principles do not apply on campus. It is a logical fallacy to say that because basic free speech principles sometimes do not apply on campus, they must never apply.

[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper distinguished professor of law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.]

Pew Research Center’s new political typology, which sorts Americans into cohesive groups based on their values, attitudes and party affiliation, and provides a unique perspective on the nation’s changing political landscape. The political typology reveals that even in a political landscape increasingly fractured by partisanship, the divisions within the Republican and Democratic coalitions may be as important a factor in American politics as the divisions between them.

The power of partisanship is reflected in attitudes about President Donald Trump. In the survey, conducted in June, President Trump’s job ratings are more deeply polarized along partisan lines than those of any president in more than 60 years. There is no typology group in which a clear majority expresses positive views of President Trump’s conduct. The 2018 midterm elections are still more than a year away, but the two groups at either end of the political typology are already highly motivated by the battle for congressional control. More than eight-in-ten Solid Liberals (84%) say it matters a great deal to them which party wins control of Congress in 2018, the highest share of any typology group. Core Conservatives are next highest, at 77%.

If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed to keep your attention as long as possible. You might not have the sense that they’re manipulating you one tap, swipe, or notification at a time. But Tristan Harris thinks that’s just what’s happening to the billions of us who use social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, and he’s on a mission to steer us toward potential solutions—or at least to get us to acknowledge that this manipulation is, in fact, going on.

Harris, formerly a product manager turned design ethicist at Google, runs a nonprofit called Time Well Spent, which focuses on the addictive nature of technology and how apps could be better designed; it pursues public advocacy and supports design standards that take into account what’s good for people’s lives, rather than just seeking to maximize screen time. He says he’s moving away from Time Well Spent these days (his new effort is as yet unnamed), trying to hold the tech industry accountable for the way it persuades us to spend as much time as possible online, with tactics ranging from Snapchat’s snapstreaks to auto-playing videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Team Internet is a network of volunteers combining people power with technology to mobilize people across the country to pressure their lawmakers to stand up for Net Neutrality. Free Press Action Fund, Demand Progress and Fight for the Future launched the project in July. Since then, Team Internet volunteers have spoken in person about Net Neutrality to 200 members of Congress or their staff at both town halls and in-district meetings.

Activists Iliana Gomez and Lesley Perg provide a critical backbone of support for Team Internet’s organizing infrastructure to make that happen. Since the end of August, they’ve done nearly all the work of the host-support team. This team has provided assistance to the scores of individuals — or hosts — who have organized meetings about Net Neutrality with their local congressional offices through Team Internet. Gomez and Perg call hosts and talk them through the details of their events, ensuring they have all the materials they need and are prepared to meet fellow activists and their lawmakers.

When Americans are asked what has brought the biggest improvement to their lives in the past five decades, they name technology more than any other advancement. And as Americans think about the next 50 years, they expect that technology, along with medical advances, will continue to have a major impact, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May to June of 2017. Technology was cited most (42%), while far fewer respondents mentioned medicine and health (14%), civil and equal rights (10%) or other advancements. Technology was identified as the biggest improvement by whites (47%) and Hispanics (35%), while blacks were about as likely to name technology (26%) as they were civil and equal rights (21%).

Three weeks ago, President Donald Trump was widely criticized for fanning racial divisions and inflaming the culture wars after he denounced a black NFL player for kneeling during the national anthem, casting the move as unpatriotic and an affront to the country. The player had intended the demonstration to call attention to police brutality against African Americans. What began as an impromptu, crowd-pleasing line at a Trump rally in Huntsville (AL) to “get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” sparked a national debate over free speech, patriotism, racial identity and cultural values.

Rather than back off and try to unify the nation, President Trump upped the ante relentlessly — and on Oct 10, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell capitulated. Concerned about backlash from fans, Goodell sent a letter to all 32 team owners asking them to support a plan to “move past this controversy” and ensure that players stand during the anthem “to honor our flag and our country.”

Chief Judge Robert Morin of the District of Columbia Superior Court ruled largely in favor of DreamHost, saying that the Department of Justice overstepped when it initially sought 1.3 million IP addresses that were logged at a website that helped organize nationwide protests against President Donald Trump on his inauguration day.

Federal authorities had initially obtained a warrant against DreamHost, the host of the disruptj20.org site, as part of its investigation into rioting and other violence on January 20, 2017. The ruling comes less than two months after government lawyers told the court it didn’t mean to seek so many IP addresses after all. Under new guidelines, DreamHost will not have to provide IP addresses or any other identifying information unless the government can show that a particular person was involved in alleged criminal behavior. Judge Morin ruled that while the DOJ could execute its warrant, "it does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost's website and discover the identity of, or access communications by, individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity, particularly those who were engaging in protected First Amendment activities."

Team Internet — a grassroots network of Network Neutrality activists — pulled out all the stops to try to stop Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai from being reconfirmed. The weekend of Sept 29, Team Internet texters recruited over 500 people to call their lawmakers and urge them to #FirePai. Over the course of the campaign, nearly 4,000 people called their members of Congress and close to 60,000 people signed a petition.

Just 5% of the more than 3,000 news stories studied during the first 100 days of the Donald Trump presidency cited a member of the public, one of nine source types analyzed. That figure compares with about three-quarters of stories that cited Trump or a member of his administration, 35% that cited another news outlet or journalist, 26% that cited a Republican member of Congress and 21% that cited a Democratic member. Stories that cited a member of the public also are less common than those that cite an expert or an interest group. The low level of citizen voices held true for the five most prominent topic areas studied: the president’s political skills, immigration, appointments and nominations, U.S.-Russia relations, and health care. Across these five topics, which accounted for two-thirds of the coverage, citations of everyday Americans never rose above 7%.

Of all the more than 22 million comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission website and through the agency's API found that only 3,863,929 comments were "unique," according to a new analysis by Gravwell, a data analytics company. The rest? A bunch of copy-pasted comments, most of them likely by automated astroturfing bots, almost all of them—curiously—against network neutrality. "Using our (admittedly) simple classification, over 95 percent of the organic comments are in favor of Title II regulation," said Corey Thuen, the founder of Gravwell. Thuen was referring to a section of the Communications Act that imposes regulations designed to protect net neutrality. In 2015, the FCC voted to reclassify internet broadband as a "telecommunications service" under Title II, effectively institutionalizing net neutrality, handing a win to open internet advocates, and a loss to big telecom.