By Miguel Angel Aguilar On March 11, the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced the launch of the tool “HODIO: Hate and Polarization footprint” that will have the function of measuring the presence, evolution and scope of hate speech on digital platforms. [ . . . ] As Jacob Mchangama has written in his […]
By Manuel Buron Being as we are – dancing to the deranged of presidential advisers and court sentences, I mean – in Spain a strange controversy went unnoticed. A professor at the University of Texas is preparing, as every year, to teach. Among the mandatory readings of his subject includes – who can think of […]
By Marcelo Brito Originally published in 2022 with the title Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama’s work is presented as what his subtitle promises: a global history of freedom of expression that starts in classical Greece and flows into the digital ecosystem. Mchangama, Danish lawyer, founder of the Justitia Idea […]
The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom Today, anyone who cares about freedom of expression needs to face 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 […]
By Jesús García Calero We live in a volatile time and it has become fashionable to organize summits against hatred. Democracies live on the defensive, powerless to safeguard their principles, with the public sphere crossed by the polarization and the arrival of a world without rules, where the … autocrats camp, and in which the […]
By Miguel Angel Aguilar The phrase “Freedom for what?” It was Lenin’s response to Fernando de los Ríos in 1920, when the Spanish socialist asked about freedom of the press and expression in Soviet Russia. This dialogue is narrated in the book My Journey to Soviet Russia. Now Lenin’s question that warned the socialist Fernando […]
By Madeleine Lacsko This week, São Paulo will host a historic masterclass on freedom of expression . The event, organized by a diverse consortium of institutions, will bring together legal experts, journalists, researchers, parliamentarians, and civil society representatives in a debate environment that has become increasingly rare in Brazil: one where dissent is possible with […]
By Abhishek Saha . . . Over the Christmas break, I read Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama’s magnificent chronicle of free speech through the ages. What struck me most was how the debates we face today—about academic freedom, censorship, and the limits of expression—are far from new. The same […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 18, 2025—NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, the critically acclaimed book by Jacob Mchangama, has returned in a new paperback edition. Originally released in 2022, this celebrated work is hailed as “the best history of free speech ever written” by P.J. O’Rourke and called “smart, insightful, and […]
By Alejo Schapire In 2022, Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama (Copenhagen, 1978) published Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (not yet translated into Spanish), an essay that traces the erratic and bloody struggle for freedom of expression in the East and West, from ancient Greece to social media. In both the book and his podcast , Mchangama […]