AZ: Arizona DOC Agrees to Pay $2,650,000 in Legal Fees and Costs in Long-Running PLN Censorship Suit

Source: prisonlegalnews.org 8/15/24 On May 3, 2024, Arizona’s Department of Corrections (DOC) settled a federal censorship lawsuit brought by PLN’s publisher,the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC). Under the agreement, DOC paid $2,650,000 to cover HRDC’s attorneys’ fees and expenses in connection with the successful litigation, the largest such award in a prison censorship case in U.S. history. Until 2014, DOC prisoners routinely received issues of PLN. That year, however, DOC began to censor numerous issues for “sexually explicit material” that violated its mail policy; the articles in question, however, merely…

Read More

Senate To Vote on Web Censorship Bill Disguised as Kids Safety

Source: reason.com 7/24/24 Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) will force a vote this week on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a measure certain to seriously restrict free speech and privacy online for everyone. The meat of the bipartisan bill is creating a “duty of care” for a huge swath of digital companies (any “online platform, online video game, messaging application, or video streaming service that connects to the internet and that is used, or is reasonably likely to be used, by a minor”). This means they’re legally required…

Read More

Kids’ Online Safety Policy Bill is a Pretext for Censorship

Source: newrepublic.com 8/2/23 The first thing you need to know about the latest bill in Congress meant to protect children on the internet is that one of its co-sponsors has been waging this fight against tech platforms since the days of MySpace. This bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, concerns children who were not yet born at the dawn of social media, whose parents could once have jockeyed to remain in each other’s Top 8, while their own parents in turn may have sounded the alarm about such…

Read More