By Natalie Alkiviadou In the email signature of a former United Nations Special Rapporteur was a sentence that has stayed with me: “I do not join manels.” A “manel”, now widely defined as an all-male panel, is not simply descriptive. It reflects structural patterns in who is recognised as an expert and who is not. […]
From Socrates to social media, society has always worried about protecting the young. But the latest ruling about Meta and YouTube overlooks the upsides of free speech. By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial before a jury of some 500 of his fellow Athenians. The indictment accused him […]
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 Natalie Alkiviadou Hate speech is a real problem. But takedowns and deplatforming are ineffective and carry damaging side effects. A better and more liberal response is to confront hateful speech directly. Hate speech emerges in concrete moments that reveal how language can hurt, marginalize and affect public participation. One such moment occurred in Brazil […]
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 Angele Latham and Evan Mealins A judge will soon weigh whether to release Nashville news reporter Estefany Rodriguez from custody after her arrest by immigration authorities in early March drew nationwide attention. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement arrested Rodriguez, who works for local news outlet Nashville Noticias, during a March 4 traffic stop in South […]
By Arunita Das and Cole Hennig | Global Network on Extremism & Technology How can we incentivise social media companies to implement AI tools for content moderation? With routine auditing and updating, we can continue to build precise AI-led tools to complement content moderation that targets extremism. The next challenge, however, is to encourage social […]