free speech

Upset parents want a Tallahassee principal to be fired over comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing new state laws. The First Amendment likely protects the principal’s job, but she’s still being pressured to exit.

As a battle continues about the constitutionality of a Florida law that seeks to crack down on social-media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, a federal appeals court has allowed a similar Texas law to take effect.

Amid national battles about speech on college campuses, a federal appeals court Thursday ruled that a University of Central Florida policy targeting “discriminatory harassment” likely violates the First Amendment.

Saying plaintiffs have offered a “parade of horribles,” attorneys for the state want a federal judge to toss out a challenge to a new law that requires conducting surveys on Florida college and university campuses about “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.”

Describing the law as a “frontal assault on the First Amendment,” two online industry groups filed a federal lawsuit Thursday seeking to block a measure pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to crack down on large social-media companies.

Civil-rights attorneys are challenging a new set of state laws that establish a crime of “mob intimidation” and enhance penalties for riot-related violence and looting, arguing in a federal lawsuit that the measures unconstitutionally “seek to arrest the peaceful expression of free speech.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican leaders recently announced proposed legislation targeting big tech giants that own social media platforms. They accuse them of censoring conservative voices. Legal experts who say the proposed crackdown is unconstitutional.

A federal appeals court has backed a decision by Florida Atlantic University to fire a professor who drew national attention for questioning whether the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut actually occurred.

The Florida House is considering a bill that would require an annual report on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity at the state’s public…