Tag

1st Amendment

Articles and publications tagged 1st Amendment across the Atmosphere.

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Articles

Publications

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

TechdirtAug 17, 2026

Another California Court Has Now Broken Media Advertising, So The Copia Institute Asked Another California Appeals Court To Fix It

A few years ago a California appeals court produced the unfortunate Liapes v. Facebook decision. In this decision, it gave the go-ahead to age discrimination claims under California’s Unruh Act resulting from ads not being served to users of certain ages. It’s a nonsensical application of anti-discrimination law, because ads are not themselves the goods...

1st amendmentaadc

TechdirtAug 17, 2026

Federal Court Rules That Blocking Speech Is Protected By The First Amendment, But Recommending It Isn’t

This ruling came out a week and a half ago at this point and I've been so annoyed with it that I kept putting off writing about it, but it's so bad that it requires a discussion. A federal district court in San Jose denied motions from a bunch of the big tech companies seeking...

1st amendmentalgoirthms

TechdirtAug 13, 2026

The Fake Free Speech President Has Unleashed ICE On Its Critics

It still amazes me that there are people out there who think that Donald Trump is a supporter of free speech. It has never been true. Anyone who looks will note that the Trump administration regularly engages in clearly unconstitutional attempts to suppress speech. But because he and his supporters like to claim he's a...

1st amendmentdonald trump

TechdirtAug 5, 2026

Trump’s War On Journalists Also Includes Targeting A Freelance NYT Contributor

Donald Trump took possession of a $400 million "gift" plane from the Qatari government earlier this year. Trump claimed it was a coup for taxpayers and a boon for America, even as he made it clear this was all about him. According to Trump, no plane was more luxurious than this graft-y replacement for the...

1st amendmentcensorship

TechdirtAug 4, 2026

eBay And Former Execs Agree To Pay $56 Million For Trying To ‘Crush’ A Journalist

For much of Techdirt's nearly three decades in existence we've covered attacks on the media by the rich and powerful. And sometimes we've been on the receiving end of such attacks ourselves. But I have never seen or heard of anything quite as extreme as what happened to Ina and David Steiner, proprietors of the...

1st amendmentcyberstalking

TechdirtAug 3, 2026

Judge To xAI: If This Law Is So Urgent, Why Did You Wait Three Months To Sue?

Last week we wrote about how Elon Musk's xAI had filed a lawsuit to attempt to block Minnesota's anti-nudify app law. As we tried to explain, even if you (reasonably, understandably) dislike both Elon and "nudify" apps, there were real problems with the Minnesota law. In particular, it was not narrowly tailored to just target...

1st amendmentamy klobuchar

TechdirtJul 30, 2026

The Worst Person You Know Just Filed A Good First Amendment Lawsuit Against A Very Badly Drafted Nudify App Ban

There's been a bunch of news this week regarding Minnesota's new law that purports to prohibit "nudification" technology, and the fact that xAI has sued to have the law blocked as unconstitutional. A few things need to be said upfront, because it's very, very easy to just say the tech is terrible, that Elon Musk...

1st amendmentai

TechdirtJul 29, 2026

Trump Admin’s Campaign Against ‘Radical Left Terrorism’ Is Built On A National Security Memo With No Congressional Approval

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters. That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on...

1st amendmentcensorship

TechdirtJul 28, 2026

The FTC Would Like To Decide Which AI Answers Are Too Woke, And Is Calling That Consumer Protection

On Friday this week the FTC's open comment period regarding its "Policy Statement Addressing AI Accuracy" will close, which means that a bunch of very smart, very busy people are wasting a ton of time this week writing up comments that will mostly be ignored by the FTC — but still matter for the record....

1st amendmentai

TechdirtJul 27, 2026

Protester Charged With Destroying Property After Giving CBP Agents His GrapheneOS ‘Duress’ Mode Passcode

Atlanta, Georgia's attempt to erect a law enforcement officer training center in Atlanta was met by months of concerted protests. As the months stretched into years (the center was announced in 2021 but did not complete construction until 2025), opposition efforts ranged from peaceful protests to heated exchanges during public comment sessions to attacks on...

1st amendment4th amendment

TechdirtJul 24, 2026

DOJ Withdraws NY Times Subpoenas After Judge Notices It Never Bothered To Follow The Rules For Subpoenaing Reporters

Just last week we had the story of the Trump DOJ issuing very questionable subpoenas of NY Times journalists while trying to track down who leaked information to those reporters regarding the potentially catastrophic security flaws of the "gift" 747 plane he received from Qatar. As we noted in that original post, this appeared to...

1st amendmentair force once

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