By Peggy Sastre INTERVIEW — What if censorship were our natural state? From ancient Greece to AI, the Danish lawyer and human rights specialist analyzes the improbable survival of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression has one major flaw: it also benefits the people we despise. Hence this feat: praising it for ourselves, then declaring […]
By Danaé Metaxa and Alex Engler Generative artificial intelligence (AI), and especially large language models (LLMs), is playing an increasingly substantial role in political discourse—for example, discussing political topics, answering legal questions, and relating election information to users. LLMs produce content that regularly reaches billions of people through chatbots and search engines, and a growing […]
By Jordi Calvet-Bademunt With the U.S. midterms approaching, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found. But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because many tech companies apply the same policies worldwide, the answers American […]
By Jacques de Saint Victor ESSAY — In Free Speech, the Danish jurist and essayist Jacob Mchangama investigates 2,500 years of liberty and its many enemies. In 1644, the English poet John Milton, the celebrated author of Paradise Lost, published one of the finest pleas ever written against censorship and in favor of freedom of […]
By Natalie Alkiviadou Political discourse increasingly unfolds within digital environments structured by algorithmic recommendation systems, viral dissemination mechanisms, and engagement-driven visibility metrics. Platforms such as TikTok do not merely host political and social debates; they shape their circulation, amplification, and public impact. Further, the speed and scale of dissemination in algorithmically mediated environments exceed those […]
A POLITICO piece about a high-stakes child-safety trial brought by red and blue states against Meta cites Ashkhen Kazaryan, who argues the judge’s decision could have far-reaching consequences for online speech. From the article “…Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University, cautioned against what she […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 30, 2026 — NASHVILLE, Tenn. —The Future of Free Speech has submitted comments to the Federal Trade Commission, warning that a proposed policy statement on “suppression of accuracy in AI systems” would violate the First Amendment. The filing responds to an FTC notice seeking public comment on whether prohibitions on deceptive […]
By Jacob Mchangama Earlier this month, Amnesty International asked Britain’s charity regulator to review the status of 117 organizations whose views on sex and abortion it dislikes. It received the public thrashing it deserved. But the threatened libel campaign now being bankrolled against it risks converting a victory for counter-speech into a cautionary tale—one in […]
By Natalie Alkiviadou On 8 July 2026, the European Parliament adopted a Resolution on the Impact of the 1974 Turkish Invasion on Cypriot Women and Girls and the Crimes Committed by Turkish Forces and Consequences on Gender Equality. The Resolution acknowledges that Cypriot women’s experiences of violence during 1974 are “often being excluded from official historical, […]
A new policy paper from the UK-based Prosperity Institute, “Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession,” cites The Future of Free Speech’s Executive Director Jacob Mchangama on the European Court of Human Rights’ record. In the paper, barrister Jon Holbrook traces the decline of free expression in Britain to decades of speech-restrictive legislation and proposes a draft […]