The Foundation supports challenges to laws in Texas and Florida that jeopardize Wikipedia’s community-led governance model and the right to freedom of expression.
An amicus brief, also known as a “friend-of-the-court” brief, is a document filed by individuals or organizations who are not part of a lawsuit, but who have an interest in the outcome of the case and want to raise awareness about their concerns. The Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief calls upon the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed in 2021 by Texas and Florida state legislatures. Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072 prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.
“These laws expose residents of Florida and Texas who edit Wikipedia to lawsuits by people who disagree with their work,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “For over twenty years, a community of volunteers from around the world have designed, debated, and deployed a range of content moderation policies to ensure the information on Wikipedia is reliable and neutral. We urge the Supreme Court to rule in favor of NetChoice to protect Wikipedia’s unique model of community-led governance, as well as the free expression rights of the encyclopedia’s dedicated editors.”
“The quality of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia depends entirely on the ability of volunteers to develop and enforce nuanced rules for well-sourced, encyclopedic content,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Without the discretion to make editorial decisions in line with established policies around verifiability and neutrality, Wikipedia would be overwhelmed with opinions, conspiracies, and irrelevant information that would jeopardize the project’s reason for existing.”
They say the multiverse contains every possible version of existence. They are wrong. There is no version of existence in which our illegitimate “supreme” court sides with any entity that exists to provide honest education to the public. As long as conservatives have infested the court (and our nation), it simply cannot happen.
How exactly is the Supreme Court “illegitimate”?
1: a majority (5 out of 9) of the judges on the court were appointed by presidents that weren’t duly elected: one was appointed by an earlier SCOTUS stopping legal ballots from being counted and the other was proven to engage in a vast election fraud conspiracy with foreign adversaries. Even after all that cheating, neither won a majority or even a plurality of votes.
2: One of those 5 and one of the remaining 4 were appointed in spite of credible accusations of serious crimes. In neither case, those accusations were seriously, thoroughly and independently investigated. In one of those cases, the reaction revealed a thin-skinned, hot-tempered and vindictive demeanor unfitting of the most local judge, let alone one of the highest court.
3: One of the above likely sexual offenders is a wholly owned subsidiary of Billionaires’ Every Whim LLC and the rest agree with the servant of nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow that no real consequences for or even reporting of ethics violations by themselves would be appropriate.
4: Another of the 5 appointed by illegitimate presidents belongs to a theocratic cult that considers religious law to supercede the secular law the courts are tasked with interpreting and shaping, making her by definition biased in favor of theocracy and against the establishment clause of the first amendment.
5: Almost all of them have neglected to recuse themselves from at least one case where they had a conflict of interest, some of them dozens if not hundreds of times
There’s probably more reasons, but those are the most obvious and indisputable ones, each of which is in itself sufficient to at the very least cast doubt on the legitimacy of the court.