He also pretended his hands were too big for gloves and perpetuated lies about President Obama. It's been a big week.

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The beautiful thing about free speech is that everybody gets it, and no individual or private company owes anyone a platform. Spotify is the latest company that is exercising its free speech by not giving the hate music of white supremacy a safe haven.

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Shocker: if you tweet Nazi salutations, your employer is free to fire you.

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When I say the ACLU filed a legal brief, you might not think that's a document you'd need to read. You might think that sounds pretty dry. I promise you, you'd be wrong.

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A federal judge recently ruled that public officials cannot engage in "viewpoint discrimination" when blocking users from their public social media profiles. What could this mean for @realdonaldtrump?

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Our Tweeter-in-chief, who calls it "fake news" when outlets report on things he actually says and things that actually happen, had another one of his patented Twitter rants this morning. With each rant becoming more and more disturbing, this one takes the cake for sheer efficiency—he managed to threaten the First Amendment and threaten a private citizen who is part of an ongoing investigation in, like, four tweets.

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We've heard a whole lot about trying to understand Trump voters and their concerns since the election, but the more time goes by, the more evidence we see that we either understood them or what they were voting for better than they did themselves. This week, that evidence comes in the form of a supposed "religious liberty" executive order that would allow for discrimination under the guise of one's religion.

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Continuing with our ongoing legal series, the time has come to discuss specific parts of the US Constitution. We’ll start at the beginning with something that’s been on everyone’s minds lately: the first amendment.

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There's a word for that.

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This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. This, of course, being a school banning  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for it's liberal use of the n-word throughout its pages. Also being banned for the same reason, To Kill a Mockingbird.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), or Protect-IP Act as it's called in the House of Representatives, has been the talk of the internet-town (and regular towns) for  months. Once everyone realized the implications this particular bill, they got extremely nervous and concerned phone calls and letters started pouring into Washington. The matter is still waiting to be settled when Congress returns from their winter recess but a list has surfaced showing particular companies who are in support of the controversial bill. And one of them is Marvel Entertainment. 

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This piece and others by artist Nathan Stapley are being sold through Gallery 1988. Because in this age of digital photography, what your wall is missing is definitely a family portrait. (via Popped Culture)

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To the left is a screencap of Tumblr from earlier today, and you're probably curious to know what it's about. Well, we're here to tell you, and you're not going to like it. And not like "Kristen Stewart might be in Akira" "not like it." Like "the United States government is taking cues from Iran and China and wants to put people in prison for five years for linking to a copyrighted site" "not like it." In the name of protecting "prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation," there is a bill currently being debated in Congress, the PROTECT-IP Act and its House version, the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA), concerning censorship of the internet that intends to leave legal windows open to prosecute regular users like you, me, and your Aunt Ethel, who just wanted to show you what her cat was doing on YouTube and happened to be playing the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera in the background. This is a matter of taking freedom of expression out of the hands of the people and giving it to corporations, who can then turn to all their consumers and say, "We have PR firms and advertising agencies to tell people about our TV show/album/movie -- stop linking to it or we'll have you pay for it." And the worst part is that anyone who tries to read this thing in order to better understand it will find themselves even more confused -- and possibly in serious trouble.

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Sen. Al Franken has been quick to use time in the Senate to define himself as an outspoken advocate of independent programming and media. During Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings he used his time to ask her for her thoughts on major media mergers such as the proposed one between Comcast and NBC Universal [Franken is not a fan].

This past Saturday Franken used his closing spot at the Netroots Nation conference to advocate for Net Neutrality. In his rousing remarks Franken told that crowd that Net Neutrality was “the First Amendment issue of our time.”

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