Rand Paul is furious. That’s because someone posted a video falsely accusing the Kentucky senator of taking money from Venezuela’s Maduro regime.

Paul should know that the First Amendment sets a deliberately high bar for defamation of public officials like him. Under New York Times v. Sullivan, he must show not just falsity, but that the speaker knew it was false or had serious doubts about the validity and published it anyway That demanding standard known as “actual malice” exists for a reason — to ensure that fear of lawsuits does not silence criticism of those who hold power, even when the speech is offensive, wrong, or deeply unfair.

Instead of fighting this battle in court against the person who created this video, Paul has redirected his anger toward Section 230, the law often described as the 26 words that created the modern Internet. Although he once defended the law’s provisions that shield online platforms from liability for user speech, Paul now argues in a recent New York Post op-ed that the only solution is to tear it down. 

At the heart of Paul’s argument is a simple demand: YouTube should have stepped in, judged the accusation against him to be false, and removed it. Once notified that the video was false, the platform should have been legally responsible for leaving it up. Section 230, he argues, prevents that from happening. 

But who decides what is false? Who decides what is defamatory? And how quickly must those judgments be made — under threat of crushing lawsuits — by platforms hosting speech from millions of users around the world?

It’s surprising to see Senator Paul, who’s been vocal against government jawboning of speech, pledge to pursue legislation that would amend the law because a private platform failed to moderate speech the way he wanted.

Paul insists this distinction is hypocritical because platforms removed his COVID-era statements they deemed as false while leaving up a lie about him. This argument collapses under its own weight. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that private companies can make editorial decisions. They are allowed to be inconsistent, mistaken, biased, or wrong. 

As the Court affirmed in Moody v. NetChoice, “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased [ . . . ] That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.” In other words, the First Amendment protects editorial discretion precisely because the government cannot be trusted with it.

If Section 230 protections are rolled back, the consequences could be profound. Some platforms will over-moderate to avoid legal exposure, removing lawful but controversial content. Others will under moderate, allowing harmful content to spread unchecked since any moderation decision could open them up to liability. 

Such a shift will not harm the powerful but the vulnerable, the dissenters, and the voices that depend on intermediaries to be heard. Smaller platforms and start-ups may shut down,  avoid hosting speech, or change their business models altogether due to litigation risk.

Paul draws a comparison between platforms and newspapers, arguing that publishers historically avoided defamation through editorial judgment. But newspapers choose what they print before publication. Platforms host speech created entirely by others, at unimaginable scale. The New York Post is still protected by Section 230 from being liable for the comment section on its online articles.

The real, speech-protective answer is defamation law. If Paul believes that a video contains lies about him, he could sue the creator for defamation and prove actual malice under the Sullivan standard. 

But we cannot and should not dismantle the legal foundation of online speech because it failed to protect one powerful man. That sets a precedent that will harm millions of marginalized voices. 

Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University.

Utah’s budding theocracy continues unimpeded as we head into the new year. On top of its other unconstitutional laws (like the oft-challenged social media ban) and legislative proposals, there’s its book ban law that has seen it become the first state to actually remove certain books from all public schools across the state.

The targeted books are exactly the ones you think they are. Of the 13 titles to make the first ban list in 2024, 12 of them were written by women. It has added more titles to the ban list for 2026, as BookRiot reports.

To begin the new year at public schools across the state, Utah officials banned three more books. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky join 19 other titles on a state-sanctioned ban list and must now be removed from all schools.

This law is basically just a heckler’s veto. No consensus is needed to subject a title to removal across the state. The law allows parents to file book challenges which, in reality, means a few bigoted activists will be able to impose their will on every resident in the state.

The law compounds this deliberate error by allowing certain schools (or those being pressured by this small group of anti-freedom activists) to place their thumbs on the scale. Since that’s what the law is designed to do, that’s exactly what has happened:

What is important to understand about the law is that despite claims this is about “local control,” schools in the state are forced to follow the decisions made in other districts. There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but two districts account for nearly 80% of the books banned statewide: Davis School District and Washington School District.

The three latest book bans came exclusively because of bans at Davis, Tooele, and Washington school districts. Again, two districts are doing nearly all of the dictating of what books are allowed at public schools throughout all of Utah.

“Local control” is as meaningless as “representative democracy.” Someone will always find a way to game the system to ensure they keep what they have if not take a little more. Political parties gerrymander. Utah legislators craft laws that allow a small subset of state schools to write the rules for the rest of them.

For now, the law remains in place and the entirety of the state remains under the direct, definitely not “local” control of a couple of school districts. For now. But things could get a bit more interesting soon, now that a serious challenge to the law has been raised by some of the authors directly affected by these bans.

A group of best-selling authors whose books are banned from Utah public schools are suing the state, arguing its sensitive materials law is unconstitutional.

Filed in federal court, the lawsuit comes after three more books were banned from K-12 schools.

[…]

Among those suing over Utah’s book ban law are award-winning novelists Elana K. Arnold and Ellen Hopkins, the Estate of Kurt Vonnegut and two anonymous Utah public high school students.

The lawsuit [PDF] raises questions the state isn’t going to be in any hurry to answer.

The Book Removal Law, codified at Section 53G-10-103 of the Utah Code, is unmoored from the First Amendment and requires Utah’s Local Education Agencies (“LEAs”) to strip their school libraries of any book that contains even a single description or depiction of sex, no matter how fleeting, no matter its context, and no matter its literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Book Removal Law also never asks the most basic question: appropriate for whom? A kindergartner learning to sound out words and a twelfth-grader weeks from graduation are treated identically. As described below, once a book is labeled “sensitive,” it must be taken from the shelf, including the high school library. There is no recognition that a seventeen-year-old preparing for college, navigating identity, relationships, and the realities of adulthood stands in a fundamentally different place than a five-year-old.

This creates an absurd mismatch with other parts of Utah’s own legal standards. State law permits sixteen-year-olds to consent to certain sexual activity. Yet the same students whom Utah trusts to make intimate, real-world decisions about their bodies are, under the Book Removal Law, barred from accessing out books that contain a mere single passage describing the very conduct in which is lawful for them to engage. The Book Removal Law tells them: you are mature enough to do this, but not mature enough to read about it.

The answer is, of course, that this isn’t about protecting children from content that might be inappropriate for them. It’s about giving bigots and public employees an easy way to remove content they personally don’t like. Because its ulterior motive is its only motive, it’s been written in a way that makes it extremely susceptible to legal challenges. With any luck, this law won’t survive much longer and the people who think no one should have access to content they don’t care for will have to go back to the ineffective seething that seems to make up a disproportionate portion of their existence.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• My year with a flip phone (Financial Times)
• Claude’s Constitution (Anthropic)
• From the CEO: What’s coming to YouTube in 2026 (Youtube)
• BBC to show programmes on YouTube in landmark deal (Financial Times)
• Rand Paul: I’ve changed my mind — Google and YouTube can’t be trusted to do the right thing and must be reined in (NY Post)
• Rand Paul Only Wants Google To Be The Arbiter Of Truth When The Videos Are About Him (Techdirt)
• Roskomnadzor Denies Reports That It’s Throttling Telegram Over Content Moderation Disputes (Moscow Times)
• Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W (Cybernews)

It’s been nearly a decade since Mike wrote about the strange trademark approval the New England Patriots received on the term “Perfect Season.” The story rang as odd for several reasons, not the least of which being that the team applied for the mark in 2008 just before that year’s Super Bowl and at a time in which the Patriots had completed an 18-0 record including the regular season and two playoff games. The Patriots then famously fell on their collective face against the Giants, making the season very much not perfect. But the team went ahead and got the mark anyway. Add to that my take that this kind of phrase for the categories of sports apparel and the like is not nearly unique enough to serve as a valid mark to begin with and we have a situation practically begging to get absurd.

And the absurdity may have arrived. For you non-sports fans in the audience, the Indiana University Hoosiers just won the College Football National Championship without losing a single game during the season. IU, in stark contrast to the Patriots, did in fact have a perfect season. But if they, or anyone else, would like to celebrate that fact, they would need to license the use of the term from the Patriots to do so.

Not only did The Kraft Group continue, they licensed the mark to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for use in a DVD in order to satisfy the “use in commerce” stipulation by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and, in 2016, the team was granted rights to the trademarks.

Unlike Pat Riley, who filed to trademark “Three Peat” when he was the coach of the Lakers and then cashed in when the Chicago Bulls and New York Yankees won three straight titles, The Kraft Group’s trademark hasn’t had many opportunities to gain royalties from the mark.

But Kraft can demonstrate it has used the term in commerce via its previous licensing agreements. That puts IU and/or apparel companies in the position to go one of three routes. They can license the term for apparel from Kraft, thereby perpetuating this entire silly enterprise, they can not license the phrase and potentially fight a court battle to invalidate the trademark after they make the products and are sued or threatened by Kraft, or they can just not use the phrase at all.

The latter appears to be the most likely route.

Items in Indiana’s team store use the word “Perfection.” Homefield Apparel, whose original school is Indiana, uses “Perfect” without “Season” on its shirts.

Even that is absurd. Again, the end result, thanks to a USPTO all too happy to approve trademarks that it probably shouldn’t, is that a team that achieved a perfect season cannot freely use the phrase that correctly describes its own accomplishment because it would have to license it from a team that didn’t.