By Matt Pearson Recent revelations from news agency Reuters that the US is “developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including hate speech and terrorist propaganda,” as a method to counter what it sees as excessive censorship in other parts of the world […]
By Deltan Dallagnol You probably didn’t realize it, but this Tuesday (10) the right had a gigantic victory against the Lula government and the pro-censorship class, which does not tire of trying to muzzle the Brazilians. It passed beaten by many people, but those who were connected on social networks saw a frantic movement on […]
By Jacob Mchangama On October 17, 1961, tens of thousands of Algerians marched through the streets of Paris in peaceful defiance of a discriminatory curfew imposed by the French state. Police opened fire, beat protesters, arrested them en masse—and, in some cases, threw people into the Seine, where they drowned. Historians later called it “the […]
By Adam Creighton The proposed additional federal hate law would lower the bar of criminality even further. It’s bound to massively chill political speech and pave the way for vexatious and politicised charges that will drag individuals through the courts even if they ultimately avoid conviction. Comedy and artistic expression will become all the more […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Samantha Barbas The Bondi Beach massacre of Dec. 14, in which 15 people were murdered during a Hanukkah celebration, has become a grim symbol of rising antisemitic violence across Western democracies. In Sydney, as well as in places like Paris, London, Berlin and Copenhagen, Jews have been living in fear of […]
By Natalie Alkiviadou George Gavriel and the Politics of Offence under Article 10 ECHR An art exhibition by Cypriot artist George Gavriel was cancelled last month following intense political and social reactions after its inauguration. Officials from the country’s conservative party DISY dismissed the paintings as obscenity and rejected freedom of expression as a justification. […]
How to fight back against government censorship of chatbots. By Jacob Mchangama “Well, then you need to shut it down.” That was Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s reaction when a Google executive explained during a recent Senate hearing that large language models (LLMs) sometimes “hallucinate” and generate false information. The Tennessee senator was outraged that Google’s […]
China is exporting its AI governance model; democracies must act now or risk letting others define the future of speech. By Jordi Calvet-Bademunt and Jacob Mchangama “China is going to win the AI race,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned recently. In a follow-up statement released shortly after making that bold proclamation, Huang softened his tone, […]
Has Europe’s crackdown on free speech become a bigger threat to democracy than ‘the extremists’ it seeks to contain? By Jacob Mchangama On the morning of November 26, three armed police officers showed up at the Berlin apartment of American playwright C.J. Hopkins. They presented a warrant, seized his computer, and questioned both him and […]
By Cathy Young During the free-speech skirmishes of the last decade, the battle lines were often drawn in a way that placed heterodox liberals and centrists on the same side as conservatives in opposing censorious progressivism. But those lines have been redrawn in recent months, after the Trump administration began aggressively targeting disfavoured expression, from […]