The letter’s requests read like a fishing expedition designed by people who fundamentally misunderstand both Wikipedia and the Constitution.
Activity tagged "free speech"
"Rather than end the genocide," Johnson said, "the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives."
I’ve spent the better part of two decades dealing with people trying to dox and harass the volunteers who make Wikipedia the incredible resource it is today.
I liked it better when they weren’t in Congress.
Letter from House Oversight Committee Chairs James Comer and Nancy Mace
I also spent six years on the same (volunteer!) Arbitration Committee from which Oversight is now demanding private communications. Even just threats like this one, regardless of followthrough, will it so much harder for them to do their thankless work.
“We will use the donated money to replace the books and buy more like them.”
And with the internet eating major broadcasters’ lunch, it’s very likely that the Ellison family paid billions of dollars for a network whose fortunes are headed to the toilet, and whose viewers are headed elsewhere. They have the potential to create a right wing propaganda bullhorn that rivals Fox News; but it’s just as likely their disastrous management turns the network of Walter Cronkite into a sad, historical footnote.
This model of media capture has since become a case study in soft authoritarian control. Its blueprint rests on four pillars: the takeover of public media, the political capture of the media regulator, the deployment of state funds as leverage over editorial content, and the strategic acquisition of private outlets. This formula has been successfully exported—with variations—to other countries. ... Efforts to manipulate the media are nothing new; history is littered with regimes that sought to bend the press to their will. What distinguishes this modern form of capture, however, is the role of the private sector. Corporations reliant on government contracts or regulatory leniency buckled under pressure, buying up media outlets and turning them into mouthpieces of state propaganda. In the digital age, media capture is often coupled with digital authoritarianism, where governments and non-state actors collaborate to use technologies to conduct surveillance, restrict access to information, and distort the journalistic ecosystem with authoritarian-friendly outlets and campaigns of disinformation.
Lawsuits like this one are not something to celebrate just because you hate Fox News.
I'm not normally one to agree with Fox, but they're right in their statement that suits like this are "designed to chill free speech critical of [Newsom]."
Even if Wikipedia’s content was biased (it isn’t), even if every editor was actively trying to push an anti-Israel narrative (they aren’t), that would still be protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to threaten organizations over their editorial choices, no matter how much certain prosecutors or publications might dislike those choices.
"I don't like them. I wouldn't read them. I'll be honest I've read the reviews on some of them…" With these words at a public meeting, Tennessee's Rutherford County School Board member Stan Vaught admitted to banning books he hadn't read — a revelation that kicked off a federal lawsuit. According to the complaint, board members relied primarily on BookLooks.org, a website connected to the Hitler-quoting group Moms for Liberty, instead of reading the books themselves or considering their literary merit. The board repeatedly overruled their own librarians' recommendations to keep books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and Ernest Cline' Ready Player One because it has "characters discussing beliefs that heaven and god are not real."
First and foremost, “steering this organization in lockstep with this Administration” is the antithesis of what museums and libraries do. These public, democratic institutions offer a breadth and depth of information and resources to ensure that users are able to understand a wide range of ideas and perspectives on any given topic. This allows people to think for themselves and draw conclusions based on evidence, rather than on what someone tells them to be the truth.