As 2025 comes to a close, The Future of Free Speech team wants to thank you for making this year its most productive yet. At a time when both the legal foundations and the culture of free expression face mounting pressure worldwide, your support helped produce timely, independent work that brought much-needed clarity to an […]
By Sammy Westfall The Macrons are fighting the defamation claims in France’s criminal courts. “While France prioritizes reputation protections, the U.S. champions a national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’” said Jacob Mchangama, executive director of the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University, […]
By Adam Růžička “Hate is hatred – no one should be exposed to it,” said European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. The fight against hatred is growing in Europe, but critics point out that sanctions are both ineffective and threaten freedom of speech. We discussed the topic with Natalie Alkiviada, a leading expert on […]
By Russell Payne Organized right-wing doxxing efforts have evaporated in the month since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the former head of Turning Point USA, leaving questions about where all the data went. In the six weeks since Kirk’s death, most of the right-wing efforts to avenge his death — except the ones in the […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Jordi Calvet-Bademunt This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly defended his company against White House artificial intelligence czar David Sacks’ accusation that Anthropic is building “woke AI.” In other words, the leader of a $183 billion AI company found himself reassuring the current administration that his company’s AI chatbot wouldn’t spread […]
By Jacob Mchangama [ . . . ] The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that […]
By Niamh Rowe The legal question Consigning the ghosts of celebrities to haunt Sora for ever might feel wrong, but is it legal? That depends who you ask. A major question remains unresolved in internet law: are AI companies covered bysection 230, and therefore not liable for the third-party content on their platforms? If OpenAI […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NEW REPORT: AI LAWS AND CHATBOTS FACE A GLOBAL FREE SPEECH TEST Study ranks countries’ AI policies and leading chatbots by how they handle lawful but controversial speech NASHVILLE, Tenn. — October 17, 2025 — Does your chatbot respond to prompts about controversial topics — or dodge them? That’s one of the […]
By Karla Adam and Kate Brady But behind Washington’s finger-pointing lies a difficult debate that is roiling many European countries: Have governments gone too far in curbing free expression when it comes to hate speech and intentional misinformation — including political propaganda and election meddling by foreign adversaries — or have they built more responsible […]
By Zachary Wolf Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a […]