By Jacob Mchangama In 1977, the Danish film director Jens Jørgen Thorsen was turned away at Heathrow on the orders of Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, after a campaign by the Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Thorsen was carrying the script for a long-planned film about the sex life of Jesus — a project that had already […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff This essay is adapted from The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) European democracies hold free and fair elections, ensure peaceful transfers of power, and maintain a vibrant media landscape. Their independent judiciaries hold governments accountable if they […]
By Peggy Sastre There is censorship that is obvious: it hits, locks up, banned, cuts the Internet, throws journalists in jail and does not bother with big words to make you understand that it prefers silence to freedom. And then there is the sweetest in her manners, cleaner on her, more satisfied with her reasons, […]
Interview by Emmanuel Tellier This Danish lawyer, based in the United States, hosts the think tank The Future of Free Speech. In his book “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022), Jacob Mchangama, a strong supporter of the right to tell the truth, draws up a gallery of portraits of defenders of […]
By Jacob Mchangama Three days after securing a landslide victory in Hungary’s parliamentary election, incoming prime minister Peter Magyar appeared on the country’s state broadcaster for the first time in 18 months and labeled it a “factory of lies” peddling “propaganda” worthy of North Korea and Goebbels. Magyar’s hostility reflects the well-documented media capture that […]
Even if it’s the act of a “lone wolf”, as first suggested by US President Donald Trump, Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner drama certainly did not happen in a vacuum. And just as mass shootings have become commonplace in a United States overrun by firearms, so have attempts on the lives of political figures. […]
By Benjamin Von Wyl Switzerland’s finance minister, Karin Keller-Sutter, has lodged a formal complaint over online abuse linked to the Grok AI chatbot. It is a bold signal against digital abuse and marks a clear break from the US understanding of free speech. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence model Grok has courted controversy in recent months. […]
By Peggy Sastre Since October 7, 2023, and the terrorist massacre perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, and since the obscene jubilation that has all too often accompanied it, even in the comfort of our own societies, antisemitism has resurfaced in France. It wears that familiar, simultaneously archaic and very contemporary face : brutal, mimetic, and […]
By Greg Lukianoff and Adam Thierer Cameron Berg, founder and director of the AI cognition nonprofit Reciprocal Research, published a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday called “AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.” In it, Berg gets at something many Americans still seem reluctant to admit: China wants world-class AI, but it also […]
Germany built aggressive systems to combat hate speech, but the line between defending democracy and undermining it may be beginning to blur. Excerpted from The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff. Copyright 2026. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. By Jacob […]