The Good Fight: Jacob Mchangama on the Global Free Speech Recession

Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University, as well as a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His latest book, with Jeff Kosseff, is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss why we’re experiencing a global free speech recession despite technological advances, how hate speech laws are being weaponized against their original intent, and whether democracies can resist the authoritarian playbook for controlling online discourse.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: In one sense, we are in a golden age of free speech. The ability for people to make their voices heard is much greater than in the past. It is much easier for a lot of ordinary people to participate in the political discourse in a meaningful way. The access to information that we have as citizens is in many respects probably better than it ever was. In earlier periods, it would have been much harder to get specialized information about things, even to do things like read a court judgment that interests you.

All of that is now available at the click of a button. That is partially a result of social media, partially a result of Google, partially a result of artificial intelligence that can now go into a lot of very interesting research for you and distill a lot of the material that you’re trying to understand. If there’s a technical document that previously perhaps you weren’t expert enough to understand, you now have an assistant that can help you do that. So in many ways it seems like we are actually in quite a good time for free speech. Why do you argue that nevertheless we should think of this period as a “free speech recession?”

Jacob Mchangama: I think you’re absolutely right. The World Wide Web, social media, and now AI—in many ways, it is true that if you compare our ability to share and access information to that of Enlightenment heroes, or even after the immediate adoption of the First Amendment or the French Declaration on the Rights of Man that did away with entrenched censorship, we have a lot more options, at least in democracies around the world. If you’re in China, it’s probably a different story, even though you could have certain tools that help you.

I think the huge difference is that for a very long time, there was this sense in democracies that free speech was part of a winning formula that entrenched freedom and democracy—that so-called third wave of democratization that washed the shore in all parts of the world—and a sense that technology was extremely helpful with that. That calculus has changed dramatically, both in democracies and authoritarian states. Authoritarian states were at one point extremely concerned about the World Wide Web and its ability to circumvent official propaganda and censorship. You see that very clearly in the so-called “Document Number Nine,” which is an internal communiqué from the Chinese Communist Party circulated shortly after Xi Jinping comes into power, which talks about how there’s a need to really crack down on western concepts of constitutionalism, press freedom, and so on.

You also see it in 2012 in Russia, after Putin essentially fakes the presidential election and comes back into office. There’s a coordinated effort to say: we don’t want the kind of street protests that were coordinated on social media, on Facebook and V-Kontakte in Moscow. That really was a bad look for Putin when he was triumphantly coming back into the presidency. At that time, democracies were still looking back at the Arab Spring and saying the internet is mostly a good thing. Then you have Brexit, you have the 2016 election, and prior to that, terrorist content from ISIS spreading on social media—and then the mood sours. Suddenly free speech is being seen not as a competitive advantage for democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy.

There is then this attempt to say we need a new conception of free speech, one that is more militant, and where we need to reimpose some kind of top-down control of the public sphere, because with the internet, it’s basically the lunatics who are running the asylum in terms of the public sphere.

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