Op-eds etc.
By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, recording the horrors and sharing them online. The attack triggered a bloody Israeli invasion of Gaza that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. It also had immediate consequences far beyond the region. In Canada, […]
Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from the new book, The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff (Johns Hopkins University Press). By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff On October 7, 2023, Hamas operatives carried out the deadliest single attack on Jews since […]
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 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 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 Ashkhen Kazaryan Rand Paul is furious. That’s because someone posted a video falsely accusing the Kentucky senator of taking money from Venezuela’s Maduro regime. Paul should know that the First Amendment sets a deliberately high bar for defamation of public officials like him. Under New York Times v. Sullivan, he must show not just […]
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 […]