By Angele Latham
The U.S. has fallen from third to ninth place in the global ranking for support of free speech rights since 2021, according to a new study published by The Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University.
The annual study, titled “Who in the World Supports Free Speech?” surveyed over 52,000 people about their support for free speech policies in 33 countries in October 2024.
This year’s findings show the U.S. has the third largest decline in support for free speech rights in the world, just behind Israel and Japan.
This is the second such survey conducted by The Future of Free Speech, said Founder and Executive Director Jacob Mchangama, allowing the organization to track developments around the world.
“Unfortunately, the developments are mostly negative,” he said. “More countries have seen a drop in support for free speech rather than an increase in support. And the U.S. has seen the third-largest drop in our composite measure of free speech support.”
[ . . . ]Hungary and Venezuela were two surprising outliers in the data, Mchangama said, considering their citizens’ high ranking for support of free speech, despite having governments that do not share the same support.
“Hungary and Venezuela are the really interesting cases, because what you see there are populations that seemingly request a higher degree of free speech than they actually enjoy,” he said. “In both of these, you’ve seen authoritarian governments place more and more restrictions on free speech. So (the data) might suggest that there’s a fairly significant part of the population who aren’t happy at the way that free speech is being treated.”
[ . . . ]A majority of respondents also reported their suspicion of the rise of AI and its potential effects on free speech. No country surveyed showed widespread support for AI generating sensitive content, like content offensive to minorities or religion, deepfakes of politicians and insults to the national flag.
“We see significantly less support for speech on the side (of AI),” Mchangama said. “For example, if you ask people in the United States whether they support insulting the flag, then you know a majority will say yes. But if you ask them if you should be allowed to insult the flag through AI-generated content, then suddenly you have a much smaller share of people who are supportive.”
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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).