By Ashkhen Kazaryan Each June, Pride Month turns our public spaces into sites of celebration and remembrance. But Pride is not just a cultural event; it is a constitutional exercise. At its core, Pride embodies the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment: speech, assembly, press, and petition. Expressive acts of defiance wrote the history of […]
By Gabby Miller — By the numbers: The Future of Free Speech, an independent think tank at Vanderbilt University, kicked off its comments arguing that conservative voices — including accounts, influencers and news sources — outperform on social media platforms. “From engagement metrics on Facebook to favorable algorithmic treatment on X (formerly Twitter) … the […]
By Ashkhen Kazaryan Key Takeaways The First Amendment protects people’s, corporations’ and other legal entities’ free speech rights from government restriction, but no court has found that AI programs themselves have the same free speech rights. AI-generated content is generally afforded the same First Amendment protections as content created by people or corporations and other […]
By Jacob Sullum [ . . . ] The FTC’s authority under Section 5 “does not, and constitutionally cannot, extend to penalizing social media platforms for how they choose to moderate user content,” Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at the Future of Free Speech, argues in a comment that the organization submitted on Tuesday. “Platforms’ content […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NASHVILLE, Tenn. — May 20, 2025 — In a public comment submitted today to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), The Future of Free Speech cautioned against efforts to regulate content moderation practices on technology platforms. The public comment comes amid an FTC inquiry into “tech censorship.” The nonpartisan think tank located at […]
By Ashkhen Kazaryan A new Tennessee law with the unassuming acronym “PEACE” might appear, on the surface, to be a mundane update to the state’s criminal code. But tucked into the legislation’s language is a clear and deliberate threat to the First Amendment freedoms of Tennesseans. On Friday, Gov. Bill Lee signed Senate Bill 30, the Protecting […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Ashkhen Kazaryan A new bill in Congress threatens to dictate what Americans can read, watch and say online. On May 8, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah and Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., introduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” (IODA) — a recycled attempt to ban online pornography nationwide. While concerns about pornography, including moral and religious ones, […]
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown Who could possibly oppose legislation to get tough on AI-generated revenge porn? For one, Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, one of two nays in Monday’s House vote on the TAKE IT DOWN Act. For another, a whole bunch of civil liberties advocates, including folks with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic […]
By Jacob Mchangama How one Dane views free speech in America. wo years ago, I moved to the United States to found a think tank devoted to defending global free expression. What better place to launch than America, which is, according to the law professor and First Amendment expert Lee Bollinger, “the most speech protective of any nation on […]
By Dan McKay A federal prosecutor’s letter to a medical journal skeptically asking about its commitment to nonpartisan debate is an unusual intrusion into editorial decision-making and may interfere with the publication’s First Amendment rights, free speech experts say. In a letter last week, Edward R. Martin Jr., interim U.S. attorney for the District of […]