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 violate civil liberties, and their jails hold no political prisoners. Yet a steady expansion of European laws against hate speech and extremism has led to crackdowns on individuals and social movements critical of government policies and politicians. The laws are advertised as aimed at the strengthening of democratic values such as equality and tolerance, but the expanding reliance on speech restrictions raises urgent questions about the future of free speech in democracies and in international law. To glimpse a future where the trend toward greater speech restrictions continues unchecked, we do not have to turn to science fiction.
Authoritarian states offer a real-time window into a dystopian world where hate-speech laws are weaponized to crush dissent and entrench unaccountable rule. The rulers of such states often cite precedents from Western democracies and international human-rights law, cloaking harsh crackdowns in the language of equality, tolerance, and social peace. In this way, nominally democratic norms are repackaged into an exportable blueprint for repression.
Understanding how laws putatively aimed at stopping hate speech and extremism are applied in these regimes lets us grasp what could happen if open societies fail to stem the tide and continue to erode free speech in the name of tolerance and democracy. Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are arguably the most prominent among the authoritarian states that are weaponizing Western norms against hate speech to serve the work of suppressing political opponents.
On 19 January 2024, thousands of protestors braved the cold to gather outside a courthouse in Baymak, a city in Bashkortostan, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation. In one of the largest demonstrations that Russia has seen since the invasion of Ukraine, protestors gathered to support Fail Alsynov, a prominent activist for Bashkir autonomy and environmental rights. Alsynov faced a charge of having incited ethnic hatred for allegedly slurring Central Asians while protesting against a proposed goldmine. In the Bashkir language, however, the term he used is frequently translated as “common people.”
As word spread that Alsynov had been hit with a four-year jail term, police with tear gas, batons, and riot shields dispersed the protesters. The now-banned Russian human-rights organization Memorial has since declared Alsynov a political prisoner.
Russia’s war on hate speech is baked into the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation. Article 29(1) guarantees everyone freedom of thought and speech. But the very next paragraph states, “Propaganda or agitation, which arouses social, racial, national, or religious hatred and hostility shall be prohibited.”
Russia’s constitutional ambivalence regarding freedom of expression mirrors Article 123 of the 1936 “Stalin” Constitution of the USSR, which held that “any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.” Repression of dissent has intensified steadily under Putin’s leadership, rising since the invasion of Ukraine until it now eclipses (in terms of numbers of people convicted of political crimes) the repression that was imposed upon Soviet citizens under Josef Stalin’s successors Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow for The Future of Free Speech. He writes about online speech, the First Amendment, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.