Our Perspectives

On the 15th March 2021, the Vatican issued a statement (approved by the Pope) which notes that the Catholic church would not bless same-sex unions, referring to them as “sinful” and underlining that God “does not and cannot bless sin.” This statement gives food for thought (for a lot of different things) but also for the issue of […]

Raghav Mendiratta is a lawyer and a Legal Fellow at the Future of Free Speech project (Justitia and Columbia University). @raghav_mendirat As per the recently released Freedom House Freedom Report, India has now been demoted to ‘Partly Free’ from the ‘Free’ category. Civil liberties and free expression have seen a slow but steady breakdown in India over the last […]

On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant logged on to 8chan and posted a message on a far-right thread to spread the word that he would be livestreaming an attack on “invaders.” Around 20 minutes later, Tarrant entered a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, with an automatic weapon and a GoPro camera. Tarrant livestreamed on Facebook […]

Within days the most powerful man in the world had been permanently cut off from communicating directly to his more than 120 million fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter. After years of providing oxygen to the political guerrilla tactics of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey finally decided that fanning the flames of […]

“We Must Save Democracy From Conspiracies,” insisted British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in a Time magazine article from Oct. 8, 2020. More specifically Baron Cohen accused Facebook of being “the greatest propaganda machine in history,” due to the platform’s failure to remove disinformation. Five days later, Baron Cohen complained on Twitter that Facebook had deleted […]

The point at which free speech ends and hate speech begins has become a burning issue in an age of social media, where billions of people have access to share synchronous content on global fora. This has raised concerns over an epidemic of hate speech, with privately owned platforms looking to human rights law for […]

The German NetzDG law to counter illegal online speech has become a prototype for internet censorship in authoritarian states. The Commission’s proposal for the new Digital Services Act must avoid this template, write Jacob Mchangama and Natalie Alkiviadou.  Jacob Mchangama is Director at the think-tank Justitia. Natalie Alkiviadou is Senior Research Fellow at The Future […]

In this piece by Raghav Mendiratta he looks into Twitter’s anticipatory Takedown of Tweets in India. On July 25, Twitter ‘withheld’ or disabled access to two tweets made by activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan. Prashant Bhushan had posted two tweets in the end of June, criticizing the Supreme Court and especially its current Chief Justice. Based on the […]

In this latest article for Rights!, Jacob Mchangama and Natalie Alkiviadou of Justitia provide a timely socio-legal commentary on Scotland’s controversial new Hate Crime Bill. The authors detail how vagueness of language and some alarming characteristics of this proposed bill are of serious concern to free speech and run contrary to existing standards under International Human Rights […]