Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, delivered the keynote address at the Bavarian American Academy’s annual conference in Munich. While there, he sat down with Claudia Koestler, a senior editor at Germany’s largest paper of record, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on the “Over Here, Over There” podcast to discuss: Why free […]
In this episode of Business Untitled, the crew is joined by Ashkhen Kazaryan, a First Amendment lawyer and former Meta content regulation lead, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, free speech, social media, Section 230, TikTok, copyright, data privacy, deepfakes, and who should be responsible when platforms or AI systems shape what people see […]
Jacob Mchangama talks about why freedom of speech is in crisis – and how countries like Switzerland could show a way out of it.
Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff are co-authors of The Future of Free Speech, a new book examining what they describe as a global “free speech recession.” In this episode, Mchangama and Kosseff talk with Nick Gillespie about why democracies are increasingly embracing speech restrictions once associated with authoritarian regimes, how fears about misinformation and child […]
About this episode: Free speech was supposed to be the great settled achievement of liberal democracy. Then came social media, cancel culture, campus speech battles, hate-speech laws, authoritarian tech control, and a new era of governments pressuring platforms from every direction. Michael Shermer speaks with free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama about why speech protections are […]
Jacob Mchangama (“The Future of Free Speech”) and Nadine Strossen (“The War on Words”) argued for the importance of free speech. This event was part of the 2026 Annapolis Book Festival held at the Key School.
Even if it’s the act of a “lone wolf”, as first suggested by US President Donald Trump, Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner drama certainly did not happen in a vacuum. And just as mass shootings have become commonplace in a United States overrun by firearms, so have attempts on the lives of political figures. […]
Jacob Mchangama on the Global Free Speech Recession by Yascha Mounk Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss how democracies and dictatorships alike have turned against online speech freedom. Read on Substack Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University, as well as a Senior […]
“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob […]
The Future of Free Speech confronts a stark truth: the right to speak freely is under siege. Once celebrated as a cornerstone of democratic societies, free expression is now met with growing suspicion and retaliation across the globe. Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff present a panoramic view of how we arrived at this pivotal moment. […]