First Amendment Friday
First Amendment Friday
Silenced Before Juneteenth
Meta has repeatedly deplatformed one of Brooklyn’s most important Black cultural institutions – JuneteenthNY. This is happening in FACT’s own community, and it is not an isolated case.
Censorship doesn’t always arrive in the form of a government order or a court injunction. Sometimes it arrives as an automated notification, impersonal, algorithmic, and nearly impossible to fight, telling a sixteen-year-old community institution that its account has been disabled for violating policies on “child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity.”
That is what happened to JuneteenthNY.
Athenia Rodney, the Founder and Executive Director of JuneteenthNY, is a regular participant in FACT’s working group. She reached out to us recently to document what her organization has been through — and we want our community to understand both the specifics of her case and what it represents in a much larger pattern.
JuneteenthNYhas spent more than sixteen years building one of Brooklyn’s largest annual Juneteenth celebrations, held each June at Linden Park in East New York. The organization is not a pop-up or a seasonal event. It is a year-round cultural institution engaged in festivals, parades, a Black Kings Gala, youth sports clinics, wellness programming, small business support, educational workshops, and a partnership with Bard High School. Thousands of community members move through its programs each year.
Over the past several years, JuneteenthNY’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have been repeatedly removed, suspended, restricted, and disrupted — most severely during the weeks leading into Juneteenth, the precise period when the organization is mobilizing its community. Athenia described what the platforms mean to her organization in terms that should make clear what is actually at stake:
Meta platforms are not simply ‘social media’ tools for us. They are core operational infrastructure connected to vendor coordination, sponsor communications, volunteer mobilization, public safety updates, ticket sales, educational outreach, livestream and digital summit promotion, community engagement, fundraising and donations, and press visibility and media coverage.
When the account goes down, the organization goes dark. Years of audience building, historical archives, direct messages, advertising systems, and community communication channels disappear. And because the organization’s business assets were linked through Athenia’s personal profile, the restriction cascaded, locking her out of her own operational infrastructure entirely.
She has submitted formal appeals, uploaded identification documents, filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the FTC, contacted state consumer protection offices, and attempted to reach Meta employees directly via LinkedIn. She is still waiting.
The accusation — child sexual exploitation — applied to an organization whose content, in Athenia’s words, “is centered around family-friendly cultural programming, educational content, youth engagement, community celebrations, small business support, wellness initiatives, and historical awareness,” is a calculated form of racist harassment.
This is not a clerical error. It is the operation of an automated system with a documented history of racially disparate enforcement. In 2019, Facebook’s own internal researchers found that Instagram users whose activity suggested they were Black were 50% more likely to have their accounts automatically disabled than white users. When those researchers brought the finding to Zuckerberg’s inner circle, they were instructed to halt all further research on race and ethnicity. The revised moderation tool was deployed without racial bias testing — by design.
That was five years before Meta’s January 2025 rollback eliminated third-party fact-checking, weakened hate speech protections, and ended proactive content enforcement. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund resigned from Meta’s own civil rights advisory council in April 2025 in response. A landmark lawsuit —Equal Rights Center v. Meta— is currently active in D.C. Superior Court, having survived Meta’s motion to dismiss in July 2025, alleging the platform provides “separate and unequal services to Black users.”
What is happening to JuneteenthNY is censorship. It may not have a human hand behind it. But the absence of a human hand is not the absence of a decision — and those decisions have consequences that fall, repeatedly and measurably, on Black community institutions doing exactly the work they should be free to do.
Context: A Pattern with a History
JuneteenthNY’s experience is not isolated. There is a documented, years-long pattern of Meta platforms suppressing Black voices, civil rights content, and cultural expression — a pattern that Meta’s own researchers identified internally and that leadership chose to bury rather than fix.
—Meta’s own researchers found the bias — and were told to stop looking.In 2019, Facebook employees studying Instagram’s automated moderation system found that users whose activity suggested they were Black were50% more likelyto have their accounts automatically disabled than users who appeared white. When researchers brought these findings to Zuckerberg’s inner circle, they were instructed to halt all further research on race and ethnicity. A revised moderation tool was then deployed — without racial bias testing, by design.NBC News, July 2020
—Black activists and artists have been suspended for documenting racism.Author and activist Ijeoma Oluo had her account suspended not for hateful content, but for sharing screenshots of racist harassment she was receiving. Activist Leslie Mac and Shaun King — once a guest speaker at Facebook HQ — were suspended for calling out white supremacy. Activist Ayo Henry had a video documenting racial slurs aimed at her removed despite 2 million views. These are documented cases, not rumors.Daily Dot
—The NAACP publicly broke with Meta over racial targeting — in 2018.The NAACP temporarily logged out of Facebook and Instagram and returned a Facebook donation, citing the platform’s history of data practices that “unfairly target users of color” and its hiring of a Republican consultancy to conduct reconnaissance on civil rights organizations. The Congressional Black Caucus simultaneously signaled readiness to pursue legislative action. That was seven years ago. Nothing substantively changed.NBC News, Dec 2018
—Meta’s January 2025 policy changes removed the remaining guardrails.Meta ended third-party fact-checking, replaced it with user-generated “community notes,” and announced it would no longer proactively scan for most policy violations. Zuckerberg framed this as fighting censorship. The practical effect: hate content targeting Black communities is now less moderated, while automated systems continue to flag and remove Black cultural content. Meta gave the Trump team advance notice of the announcement.CNN, Jan 2025|NBC News full breakdown
—A 2025 survey of 7,000+ users documents the post-rollback impact on people of color.GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed users across 86 countries focusing on those with protected characteristics. Among people of color: 78% reported an increase in harmful content since January 2025; over 25% said they had been directly targeted with hate or harassment; 77% feel less safe expressing themselves on Meta platforms.GLAAD Make Meta Safe Report, Sept 2025
—The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented the historical over-moderation of Black and marginalized communities.EFF has tracked Meta’s pattern of silencing oppressed communities for over a decade, noting that the January 2025 changes failed to address over-moderation of Black, LGBTQ+, and activist voices while simultaneously opening the door to dehumanizing content targeting those same communities.EFF, Feb 2025
—The NAACP Legal Defense Fund resigned from Meta’s civil rights advisory council in April 2025.LDF withdrew after Meta eliminated DEI programs and overhauled its moderation policies without consulting the council it had assembled specifically to advise on civil rights issues. The resignation was a public statement that Meta’s civil rights infrastructure is, functionally, gone.
—A landmark civil rights lawsuit against Meta is currently active in D.C. Superior Court.Equal Rights Center v. Meta (filed February 11, 2025) alleges that Meta’s advertising algorithm disproportionately steers ads for for-profit colleges to Black users while sending public nonprofit college ads to white users — reinforcing predatory educational practices along racial lines. On July 24, 2025, the court denied Meta’s motion to dismiss. The Brookings Institution called this “the most important tech case flying under the radar,” noting it invokes legal doctrine dating to the Freedom Riders and establishes a model for holding AI systems accountable under state civil rights law.Lawyers’ Committee|Brookings analysis|Court ruling summary
—Independent academic research confirms Meta’s algorithms discriminate by race even when advertisers use neutral criteria.Princeton researchers found Meta steers public school ads disproportionately to white users and for-profit college ads disproportionately to Black users — even with race-neutral targeting settings. A separate 2024 field experiment found Meta’s budget optimization tool funneled roughly 64% of advertising dollars toward light-skinned models, compounding user bias algorithmically.Princeton study via Brookings|Advertising discrimination study (arXiv)
—The deplatforming of JuneteenthNY fits a national pattern of pressure on Juneteenth observance.Multiple cities canceled their 2025 Juneteenth celebrations, citing the anti-DEI political climate, safety fears amid rising racial aggression, and withdrawal of corporate and government funding. Some NAACP chapters moved celebrations off federal property out of fear that Juneteenth programming could be construed as violating Trump’s DEI executive orders. The holiday remains legally protected — but its community infrastructure is being dismantled in practice.
Time to Unperson: When Erasure Amplifies
In early March 2026, a mural on the side of a Roscoe, NY furniture store was painted over without notice. Painted were three words, “time to unperson,”poignantly borrowed from Orwell’s1984coinage for the bureaucratic deletion of a person from the historical record. The artist, Seth Indigo Carnes (SIC), had completed the work in summer 2025 as part of his ongoingMiniluvproject, named for Orwell’s Ministry of Love.
Vague local objections, mostly that the phrase was “vulgar” or “divisive,” escalated into seven months of pressure on the building owner, and then the destruction of SIC’s artwork. On April 1, 2026, Carnes filed suit in the Southern District of New York. The complaint pairs a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 First Amendment claim against the Town of Rockland with a Visual Artists Rights Act (17 U.S.C. § 106A) claim against the building owner.Source
The doctrinal architecture is unusually clean.Reed v. Town of Gilbert(2015) confirmed that content-based regulation of expressive imagery on private property triggers strict scrutiny. Carnes’s mural was painted with the building owners’ contractual permission; municipal pressure to remove specific words is the textbook viewpoint-discrimination scenario. Courts have repeatedly sided with artists in these cases. In 2025, the Institute for Justice prevailed againstConway, New Hampshire, after the town ordered a bakery to alter a student-painted donut mural; the federal court held the enforcement “would not pass any level of scrutiny.”Mandan, North Dakota, faced a similar suit after admitting it banned front-of-building murals to suppress work that might “provoke thought.”
The VARA claim has its own settled precedent. InCastillo v. G&M Realty(the 5Pointz case, Second Circuit, 2020), the court affirmed $6.75 million in statutory damages against a Queens building owner who whitewashed graffiti murals before demolition — what the district judge called “an act of pure pique and revenge.” Kent Twitchell’sEd Ruscha Monument, painted over in Los Angeles in 2006, settled for $1.1 million. VARA requires 90 days’ written notice before destroying a covered work; a sudden overpainting, undertaken under community pressure rather than structural necessity, is precisely the conduct the statute was written to deter.
SIC joined our most recent FACT meeting to share information about his case, and we’re honored to amplify his case. What makes the Miniluv case especially worth FACT’s attention is the recursion. Orwell’s term for state-sponsored erasure has itself been erased — and the erasure has produced national press, a federal complaint, and the National Coalition Against Censorship’s coordinated response, including a planned statement, video, and press contact. NCAC has encouraged Carnes to explore a local re-manifestation of the work, on the theory that destruction tends to amplify rather than silence the message. We’re glad to be supporting this effort.
This is a recognizable First Amendment principle: thechilling effectruns in one direction, but theStreisand effect (where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the increasing public awareness of the information) runs in the other, and suppression often supplies the very evidentiary record — willfulness, viewpoint animus, public attention — that makes the legal claim cohere.
The phrase on the wall described what was happening before it happened. Then it happened. Now it’s being litigated.
Art, Identity, and the First Amendment in Lincoln, Nebraska
Last week I visited the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to seeHyphen American: Intersections of Identity, a curated exhibition of works from the museum’s collection marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. The show features work by Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, Dorothea Lange, Nicholas Galanin, Carmen Lomas Garza, Nona Faustine, Fritz Scholder, Catherine Opie, Binh Danh, and many others — organized across three sections: self-presentations, histories and struggles, and the formation of communities and rituals. The catalogue is published in the four most-spoken languages in Lincoln: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Arabic. I am often struck by the depth of artistic discourse happening in small cities across this country that escapes the notice of our major coastal media centers. This show would command attention in New York or Los Angeles. In Lincoln, it was free and open on a Tuesday afternoon.
The exhibition opens with Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too”
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Hughes’ declaration that the speaker sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes will, tomorrow, sit at the table, and nobody will dare say otherwise is a poem about demanding a seat at the table – the table of power, of relevance, of national purpose and destiny. Hughes does not reject America; he claims it. The difference matters. He embraces the heterogeneity of American life and insists on equity within it.
That insistence threads through the show and through the language of leaders who followed. Jesse Jackson, at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, offered the quilt: America as many patches, many pieces, many colors, all held together by a common thread. David Dinkins, in his 1990 inaugural address as New York’s first Black mayor, gave us the gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith, national origin and sexual orientation, of families who arrived yesterday and generations ago. Both images refuse the melting pot. Both demand that difference not only survive but be
seen.
Writing a First Amendment newsletter, I see this exhibition through a constitutional lens. The five rights protected by the First Amendment — religion, speech, press, assembly, petition — are not just procedural guardrails. They are the structural architecture for exactly the kind of pluralism these artists depict. The founders proposed, however imperfectly and incompletely, a framework in which every voice could be heard regardless of race, gender, religion, or origin — a framework that assumed disagreement, difference, and dissent were not threats to the republic but conditions for its survival. Free expression is how the gorgeous mosaic speaks. Assembly is how its communities form. Petition is how its grievances reach power. The press is how its stories circulate. And religious liberty is how its spiritual traditions coexist.
Curator Christian Wurst describes the show as communicating a kind of Americanness that does not require unity or assimilation. That is also a description of the First Amendment itself. The right to speak is not a right to agree. The right to assemble is not a mandate to conform. What Hughes demanded at the table — presence, dignity, equity — is what the First Amendment structurally guarantees, when it is honored.
Hyphen American: Intersections of Identityruns through July 5, 2026 at the Sheldon Museum of Art, 451 North 12th Street, Lincoln, NE. Admission is free.
The Red Carpet and the Picket Line
On the evening of May 4, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the 2026 Met Gala, fashion’s most extravagant annual fundraiser. This year’s lead sponsor was Jeff Bezos, who alongside his wife Lauren Sánchez contributed a reported $10 million. Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, and Snapchat all purchased tables at $350,000 each; individual tickets hit $100,000. The event raised a record $42 million — up from last year’s $31 million — marking the first time a tech figure served as lead sponsor.FortuneFortune
The backlash was immediate and inventive. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon projected video interviews with Amazon workers onto the Bezoses’ Manhattan penthouse, alongside slogans including “If You Can Buy the Met Gala, You Can Pay More Taxes.” One projection featured Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker, testifying that she struggles paycheck to paycheck. The group placed hundreds of bottles of fake urine inside the Met itself — a reference to Amazon workers’ reports of having to skip bathroom breaks. Chris Smalls, cofounder of the Amazon Labor Union, was arrested outside the gala after jumping a police barricade while holding a sign about Amazon’s refusal to negotiate a contract with its Staten Island workers. Meanwhile, labor unions staged the “Ball Without Billionaires” in the Meatpacking District — a counter-runway featuring Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers in looks from independent designers, with signs reading “Labor is Art.” Democracy Now!
The objection is not to philanthropy. It’s to a structure in which a company facing active labor disputes, documented workplace safety complaints, and contracts providing cloud computing to ICE gets to purchase the cultural legitimacy of America’s most visible museum. When a monopoly sponsors the gala, the gala sponsors the monopoly. Bezos’s $10 million doesn’t just fund the Costume Institute — it launders a brand.
The First Amendment angle here is the one most often forgotten: the right of the people peaceably to assemble. That right — alongside the right to petition for redress of grievances — is the constitutional foundation not just of protest but of labor organizing itself. As the National Constitution Center notes, the right of assembly has been invoked by suffragists, abolitionists, religious organizations, labor activists, and civil rights groups as a protection for dissenting and unorthodox groups. The picket line is a First Amendment act. The union drive is a petition. InDe Jonge v. Oregon(1937), the Supreme Court held that the right of peaceable assembly is cognate to free speech and free press, and equally fundamental. That case, notably, involved a dockworker organizing for a labor union through the Communist Party.Constitution Center
What played out on Fifth Avenue this past Monday was a live demonstration of how these rights operate under pressure. Smalls was tackled by police on the red carpet. The Ball Without Billionaires went on a few miles south. The projections lit up a penthouse. The assembly clause doesn’t guarantee comfort or access; it guarantees the right to show up, speak, and be counted. The red carpet and the picket line are both exercises in public spectacle. Only one of them is constitutionally protected.
