San Francisco should not be part of tech exec’s censorship campaign

Tech executive Maury Blackman’s effort to censor the press isn’t going well.

Since he sued journalist Jack Poulson, the domestic violence arrest Blackman’s trying to conceal went from the relatively small readership of Poulson’s Substack blog to the big readership of major metropolitan and even international news outlets.

And now the unconstitutional law he invoked to threaten Poulson is being challenged in a new lawsuit by California’s First Amendment Coalition, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

It’s far from the first example of the “Streisand Effect,” but what’s unusual about the case is Blackman’s accomplice: San Francisco’s City Attorney David Chiu. We wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle with Ginny LaRoe of FAC, calling out Chiu for threatening Poulson at the request of Blackman’s lawyers.

We told Chiu to go back to constitutional law class and stop carrying water for censorial bullies. Read the op-ed here.