TL;DR

• DOJ Joins Federal Challenge to Colorado’s AI Discrimination Law: The U.S. Department of Justice intervened in a federal lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s xAI against Colorado’s AI discrimination law, marking the first challenge from the federal government to a state AI law in court. The lawsuit argues that the legislation compels developers to embed ideological judgments into AI model outputs and violates the Equal Protection Clause.

• White House Releases Legislative AI Blueprint: The Trump administration issued a national AI policy framework urging Congress to centralize AI oversight and preempt state regulation in order to avoid government censorship. Whether that framing actually safeguards against censorship or merely moves regulatory powers remains an open question.

• Washington State Enacts AI Disclosure and Chatbot Safety Laws: Washington Governor Ferguson signed three AI bills requiring watermarks on AI-generated media, disclosure and safety obligations for companion chatbots, and a new private right of action for unauthorized deepfake uses of a person’s voice or likeness — with critics warning that litigation-driven enforcement may create compliance uncertainty.

• Anthropic Sues Trump Administration Over Pentagon Blacklisting: Anthropic is challenging its designation as a supply-chain risk, alleging the move was direct retaliation over its refusal to allow the Pentagon to use Claude for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons targeting.

• Court Refuses to Block California’s AI Training Data Transparency Law: A federal court declined to halt California’s law requiring AI companies to publicly disclose summaries of their training data, rejecting xAI’s argument that the requirement violates the First Amendment and constitutes an unconstitutional taking of trade secrets.

• Florida Opens Criminal Probe Into ChatGPT Outputs: Florida’s attorney general launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI over allegations that ChatGPT advised the FSU shooting suspect on weapon choice and targeting. The company faces a separate lawsuit from the families of victims of the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in British Columbia, who claim it failed to alert police after internally flagging the shooter’s account months before the attack.

• China Rolls Out National AI Ethics Review Framework: China introduced its first comprehensive AI ethics review regime, requiring pre-deployment approval for AI systems capable of shaping public opinion or social mobilization — placing censorship upstream of any user interaction, with a government-maintained list of high-risk activities that can be updated without notice or challenge.

• India’s AI Content Rules Drive Wave of Takedowns: India’s amended IT Rules have triggered documented removals of journalist and satirist content, while a new draft amendment would require platforms to treat informal ministerial advisories as binding law — raising serious constitutional concerns about overbroad speech regulation.

• Philippines Launches Multi-Agency Deepfake Initiative: The Philippines’ government formalized a whole-of-government response to AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes, combining legal enforcement with platform pressure. Now, legitimate dissent could be criminalized under laws broad enough to cover content “inciting disobedience to lawful authority.”

• Meta Faces Senate Scrutiny Over AI Surveillance Glasses: U.S. senators pressed Meta over plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban glasses, warning the technology could identify people at protests without their knowledge. Civil society groups, including the ACLU and 75 organizations, have also called on Meta to halt the plans entirely, describing them as a threat to anonymous public life.

• African Governments Expand AI-Driven Surveillance: Eleven African governments have spent at least $2 billion on Chinese-built AI surveillance infrastructure to reduce crime, despite researchers finding no evidence that it will do so.— Now, researchers claim it is instead being used to monitor political opponents, journalists, and activists without adequate legal safeguards.

Major Stories

» DOJ Joins Federal Challenge to Colorado’s AI Discrimination Law

• Elon Musk’s xAI sued to block Colorado’s Artificial Intelligence Act, and the Department of Justice moved to intervene—marking the first time the federal government has challenged a state AI law in court.

• Details:

  • xAI’s complaint argues that building an AI model is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment and that compelling developers to redesign systems to avoid disparate demographic outcomes amounts to government-compelled expression.

  • The DOJ, joining through its Civil Rights Division, argues the law also violates the Equal Protection Clause by requiring companies to mitigate disparate impacts while simultaneously carving out an exemption for algorithms designed to advance “diversity” or “redress historical discrimination.”

  • The same afternoon the DOJ intervened, Colorado’s Attorney General agreed to voluntarily halt enforcement of the law pending resolution of the litigation, with the state legislature facing a narrow window to pass an amended version before the current text is either struck down or takes effect on June 30.

Free Expression Implications: The case tests whether AI model design constitutes protected speech and whether anti-discrimination mandates amount to compelled expression. The DOJ argues that a state anti-discrimination law itself distorts expressive outputs. The outcome will shape whether states can mandate how AI systems weigh protected characteristics, and how far First Amendment doctrine extends into AI governance.

For insight into Colorado’s AI Act, see the US chapter of FoFS’s report: “That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Policies, and the Future of Expression.” The Act regulates “high-risk” AI systems, but exempts chatbots governed by an “accepted use policy” prohibiting “discriminatory or harmful” content, leaving these terms undefined. This could incentivize companies to adopt content restrictions that may sweep in protected speech to avoid liability.

» White House Releases National AI Policy Blueprint

• The White House released its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, outlining nonbinding legislative recommendations to guide Congress toward a unified federal approach to AI regulation and preemption of state laws.

• Details:

  • The Framework is organized around seven pillars: child protection, AI infrastructure, intellectual property, censorship and free speech, innovation, workforce, and federal preemption of state AI laws.

  • The “Preventing Censorship and Protecting Free Speech” calls on the government to protect free speech and the First Amendment and on Congress to prohibit federal agencies from coercing AI providers to ban or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas, and to provide redress mechanisms where the government attempts to censor expression on AI platforms.

  • On state preemption, the Framework recommends prohibiting state laws that “impose undue burdens” on AI development.

  • The Framework’s release was met with immediate pushback from the other side of the aisle: Representative Beyer and Democratic colleagues introduced the GUARDRAILS Act, which would nullify the December AI preemption executive order and prohibit the use of federal funds to implement it.

Free Expression Implications: The Policy Framework’s reference to defending the First Amendment is welcome. It is also encouraging that, unlike recent Executive Orders, the framework does not emphasize neutrality or “truth-seeking.” At the same time, previous statements and Executive Orders framed in culture-war terms counsel caution. The Framework’s age-assurance recommendations, which condition access to lawful speech on identity disclosure, also give pause. For additional insight, see our statement here.

» Washington State Enacts AI Disclosure and Chatbot Safety Laws

• Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed three AI bills in March 2026 covering AI content disclosure, companion chatbot safety, and a new right to sue over unauthorized AI-generated uses of a person’s voice or image.

• Details:

  • House Bill 1170 requires large AI companies to identify when images, video, or audio are created or substantially altered by AI — through watermarks or embedded metadata — and to offer detection tools. House Bill 2225 requires companion chatbots to disclose they are not human at the start of every conversation and every three hours, with hourly reminders for minors, and bans manipulative engagement tactics designed to deepen emotional attachment. A separate law allows individuals to sue over unauthorized deepfake uses of their voice or likeness.

  • Critics warn that allowing enforcement standards to be defined through private lawsuits rather than agency rulemaking may create uncertainty for responsible actors trying to comply in good faith. Ferguson signed the bill without changes.

Free Expression Implications: Disclosure and duty of care requirements can indirectly shape expressive content. Providers facing liability may limit nuanced discussion of sensitive topics — mental health, sexuality, identity — to avoid exposure. The concern is particularly acute for younger users: those who may most need reliable, non-judgmental information on difficult subjects are precisely those for whom the new restrictions apply most stringently.

» Anthropic Sues Trump Administration Over Pentagon Blacklisting, Raising First Amendment Questions

• Anthropic filed a lawsuit in California in March 2026, challenging the Trump administration’s designation of the company as a “supply-chain risk” — effectively barring government agencies from working with Anthropic after the company refused to allow the Pentagon to use Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons targeting. Anthropic argues the designation was unconstitutional retaliation for its First Amendment-protected advocacy on AI safety.

• In a parallel proceeding, Anthropic filed in the D.C. Circuit, challenging a separate government-wide supply-chain designation under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, which effectively warned all federal contractors to avoid using Anthropic’s products in defense work.

• Details:

  • In California, a federal judge granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction on March 26, finding the company likely to succeed on its First Amendment arguments and other claims. She called the government’s rationale “Orwellian” and held that the measures looked like punishment for Anthropic’s public criticism rather than a genuine security response. The ruling temporarily blocks the government’s actions, with the government’s appeal now before the Ninth Circuit.

  • At the D.C. Circuit, a three-judge panel denied Anthropic’s emergency stay of the separate FASCSA designation on April 8 — explicitly declining to reach the First Amendment merits, and finding that Anthropic’s harms, while real, were primarily financial rather than constitutional in nature. The ACLU and CDT filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic, arguing its advocacy for AI guardrails is constitutionally protected.

Free Expression Implications: The case raises significant and unresolved questions, notably whether and how ethical limits implemented by AI companies in their models can be enforced against government customers.

» Court Refuses to Block California’s AI Training Data Transparency Law

• A California federal court declined to halt enforcement of California’s AI training data transparency law in March 2026, denying xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction in X.AI LLC v. Bonta — leaving in place a requirement that generative AI companies publicly post summaries of the datasets used to train their systems.

• Details:

  • California’s AB 2013 requires developers of generative AI systems available in that state to disclose the sources and owners of training datasets, whether they contain personal data or copyrighted material, approximate dataset size, and whether data was purchased or licensed. It does not require disclosure of proprietary model weights or system architecture. OpenAI and Anthropic have already posted compliant disclosures.

  • xAI raised three constitutional challenges: that the law compels disclosure of trade secrets, constitutes an unconstitutional taking of property without compensation, and violates the First Amendment by compelling speech. Judge Bernal denied the injunction, finding xAI had not shown it was likely to succeed on any of these claims — but the ruling addresses only the threshold for emergency relief, not the law’s ultimate constitutionality. The case proceeds on the merits.

Free Expression Implications: The case is still ongoing — the court’s denial of a preliminary injunction leaves the constitutional questions unresolved on the merits. xAI’s First Amendment argument, if ultimately accepted, could mean that decisions about what data to use to shape an AI system’s outputs constitute protected expression that the government cannot compel disclosure of.

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» Florida Launches Criminal Investigation Into ChatGPT Outputs

• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced a criminal investigation into OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT advised the man accused of a mass shooting at Florida State University on what ammunition to use, what time of day to strike, and where on campus to find the most people.

• Details:

  • Uthmeier sent subpoenas to OpenAI requesting its policies on responding when users make threats to harm others, and said at a press conference: “If it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder.” The criminal investigation follows a civil inquiry announced earlier the same month.

  • OpenAI has disputed the characterization, stating ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources” and did not encourage illegal activity, and noted the company proactively shared the suspect’s account information with law enforcement after the shooting.

  • A parallel lawsuit in British Columbia, Canada alleged ChatGPT discussed gun violence with the perpetrator of a mass shooting in February 2026, and that OpenAI’s internal systems flagged the account eight months before the shooting, but the company chose not to alert authorities. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologized to the community, but the company is expected to face more than two dozen additional suits in the coming weeks.

Free Expression Implications: The probe raises foundational questions about whether AI outputs are more analogous to protected speech or regulated conduct. No U.S. court has yet held a general-purpose AI provider criminally liable for a user’s violence. If such a precedent were established, providers would likely sharply curtail responses on sensitive topics well beyond what existing law requires, with a significant chilling effect on lawful AI-mediated speech.

» China Introduces National AI Ethics Review Framework

• China has rolled out its first comprehensive AI ethics review framework, jointly issued by ten government departments, requiring universities, research institutions, healthcare providers, and companies to establish ethics compliance systems before deploying AI that could pose risks to human dignity, public order, or health.

• Details:

  • At the core is a pre-deployment approval process: institutions must obtain ethics clearance from internal committees before proceeding, with a mandatory additional government-led expert reassessment for high-risk activities — including algorithms capable of shaping public opinion or social mobilization, and systems that significantly affect behavior, emotions, or health.

  • The high-risk list is updated dynamically by government ministries, and a parallel oversight regime allows authorities to suspend or terminate AI projects if risk conditions change during implementation.

Free Expression Implications: The framework’s most significant provision from a free expression standpoint is its designation of systems capable of “shaping public opinion or social mobilization” as high-risk — subject to government-led expert reassessment before deployment. Pre-deployment review of expressive AI systems places censorship upstream of any user interaction, and the dynamic updating of the high-risk list means the boundaries of permissible AI speech can shift without notice or challenge.

For insight into China’s AI policies, see the China chapter of FoFS’s report: “That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Policies, and the Future of Expression.”

» India’s AI Content Rules Drive Wave of Takedowns Against Journalists and Satirists

• India’s amended IT Rules, which took effect in February 2026 and introduced a three-hour takedown window for AI-generated content, have been accompanied by a documented surge in government-ordered content removals targeting journalists, satirists, and political commentators — with no public explanation of which ministry ordered the actions or why.

• Details:

  • A March 30 draft amendment would go further, requiring platforms to comply with informal ministerial communications — advisories, clarifications, and directives — as a binding condition of safe harbor protection. Platforms that fail to comply with these communications—which are instruments that carry no force of law and require no parliamentary scrutiny—would face liability for all user content. The same draft would extend a Code of Ethics designed for professional publishers to ordinary social media users discussing current affairs.

  • Critics warn the draft reproduces the logic of a provision the Bombay High Court struck down in 2024 for being unconstitutionally vague and overbroad — but broadens the trigger from a single fact-check unit to an indefinite class of executive communications.

Free Expression Implications: Strict regulatory deadlines create structural incentives toward over-compliance. When platforms face liability for delay or misjudgment, lawful but controversial speech becomes collateral damage. The Indian case illustrates how AI safety regimes can become instruments of speech control when paired with punitive intermediary liability frameworks.

For insight into India’s AI policies, see the India chapter of FoFS’s report: “That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Policies, and the Future of Expression.”

» Philippines Launches Coordinated Government Initiative Against Deepfakes

• The Philippine government has launched a multi-agency initiative under “Oplan Kontra Fake News,” formalizing coordination among justice, communications, and technology agencies to combat AI-generated deepfakes and online disinformation.

• Details:

  • The Department of Justice, Presidential Communications Office, and Department of Information and Communications Technology signed a memorandum of agreement that combines legal enforcement, platform coordination, and public education. Authorities argued that AI-generated false narratives — particularly on economic issues — could trigger panic, distort markets, and undermine institutions, and noted that content may constitute offenses under the Revised Penal Code and the Cybercrime Prevention Act.

  • In a parallel move, the government wrote to Meta demanding expedited takedown protocols for “high-risk content” and a 24/7 enforcement coordination point, warning that failure to comply could prompt regulatory and legal measures. Meta indicated its platforms are committed to supporting the effort.

Free Expression Implications: The framework’s stated commitment to preserving constitutionally protected speech sits alongside enforcement tools broad enough to reach content that ‘incites disobedience to lawful authority.’ When governments can demand expedited platform takedowns of content deemed harmful to ‘economic stability’ or ‘confidence in institutions,’ there is a real risk that speech is restricted simply because it is inconvenient.

» US Senators Press Meta Over AI Surveillance Glasses

• U.S. senators formally pressed Meta over the civil liberties implications of its AI-enabled smart glasses after internal company documents revealed plans to add facial recognition capable of identifying strangers in real time — a feature Meta internally referred to as “Name Tag.”

Details:

• Senators Markey, Wyden, and Merkley sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter in March 2026 warning that the glasses could be used to identify people at political rallies and demanding answers about data retention, database scope, and whether biometric data would be used to train Meta’s AI models. Meta did not respond by the senators’ April 6 deadline.

• In April 2026, the ACLU and 75 organizations called on Meta to halt and publicly disavow the plans, warning the glasses would allow anyone to identify strangers by name at protests, medical clinics, and other sensitive locations — and link those identities to databases containing information on health, habits, and relationships.

Free Expression Implications: Glasses equipped with facial recognition would eliminate any expectation of anonymity in public life. The ability to be identified — and profiled — during a protest, a clinic visit, or an ordinary social interaction creates a chilling effect that operates before any speech is uttered. As the ACLU coalition warns, this is not merely a privacy concern: the erosion of anonymous public presence is a prerequisite condition for free expression, and its loss would fall hardest on those already most exposed to surveillance and retaliation.

» African Governments Accelerate Deployment of AI-Driven Surveillance Systems

• Governments across Africa are rapidly deploying AI-enabled surveillance technologies—including facial recognition and biometric identification—often with minimal legal oversight, raising alarms about protest monitoring and repression.

• Details:

  • Eleven African countries have spent at least $2 billion on Chinese-built “smart city” surveillance infrastructure, including AI-enabled CCTV and facial recognition systems.

  • The systems are being rolled out without adequate legal frameworks to protect human rights, and researchers warn that they are increasingly being used to monitor political opponents, journalists, and activists rather than to address the security threats that were used to justify their procurement.

Free Expression Implications: When individuals know—or suspect—that their movements can be automatically tracked, participation in protests and political discourse becomes riskier. In environments with limited rule of law, AI surveillance enables repression at scale, eroding anonymity and chilling expression long before overt censorship occurs.

The Future of Free Speech in Action

The Future of Free Speech has been reviewing how model behaviors shape freedom of expression and political conversations, as part of its broader commitment to engage with industry, policymakers, academia, and civil society. Anthropic has highlighted our collaboration in their update on election safeguards. This work builds on projects such as That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Chatbots, and the Future of Expression.

Senior Research Fellow Jordi Calvet-Bademunt was a speaker at a multistakeholder event in Dublin, attended by industry representatives, civil society, and scholars, that focused on digital rights and risk mitigation. He warned against the dangers posed by vague, risk-based regulations and emphasized the need for enforcement guidance that is firmly committed to protecting freedom of expression.

Jordi will speak at the 2026 Internet Communications Governance Forum, to be held in Taipei on May 12–13, 2026. He will discuss developments in international AI legislation and their implications for free speech. The event is organized by Taiwan’s National Communications Commission and the Taipei Computer Association.

Executive Director Jacob Mchangama will speak at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on May 12, 2026. He will discuss the “AI and Censorship” dilemma.

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Isabelle Anzabi is a research associate at The Future of Free Speech, where she analyzes the intersections between AI policy and freedom of expression.

Jordi Calvet-Bademunt is a Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt University.

Few phrases carry as much rhetorical force in contemporary politics as “protecting children.” Across Europe and beyond, governments have invoked it to justify everything from content moderation laws to age-verification mandates to outright bans on speech about LGBTQ individuals. In April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) drew a line.

In Commission v Hungary, the CJEU issued a judgment on Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ law. The Hungarian law did not emerge in isolation. It formed part of a broader political pattern in which the (former) government used “family values,” “child protection,” and “LGBT ideology” rhetoric to restrict rights, stigmatize minorities, and consolidate illiberal political identity.

Scholarship on the rule of law backsliding in Central Europe notes how attacks on democratic standards often go hand in hand with restrictions on expression, assembly, reproductive rights, and minority rights. Hungary’s law followed this template. The CJEU’s decision is not only an important ruling on equality, but it also represents a major victory for free speech that highlights how deeply intertwined equality and freedom of expression are.

The CJEU held that Hungary’s 2021 legislation, framed as a child protection measure, unlawfully restricted access to content concerning homosexuality, gender identity, and gender reassignment. In doing so, it violated, among other provisions, Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which stipulates that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

The European Commission began infringement proceedings in July 2021, arguing that Hungary’s (and Poland’s) legislation limited minors’ access to content that “promotes or portrays” divergence from sex assigned at birth, gender reassignment, or homosexuality. In July 2022, the Commission referred Hungary to the CJEU, stating that the law violated internal market rules, fundamental rights, and EU values. Commentators at the time described the law as part of a longer sequence of measures targeting LGBTQ people in Hungary.

The law’s speech implications were central from the start. Hungary did not simply regulate explicit sexual material. It restricted the depiction, discussion, and circulation of LGBTQ lives. As the CJEU emphasized, the law treated audiovisual programs portraying homosexuality and gender reassignment differently from programs portraying heterosexual or cisgender identities. That distinction, the CJEU said, was based on “a preference for certain identities and sexual orientations to the detriment of others, and thus contribute[d] to the stigmatisation of the latter.”

For free speech, that is the core problem. The state singled out a category of lawful expression because of the identities and viewpoints it represented.

Child Protection Cannot Justify Viewpoint Suppression

The judgment does not deny that children may be protected from genuinely harmful material. But it rejects the idea that “child protection” can be used as a blanket justification for suppressing content about LGBTQ identity.

The CJEU was explicit. It held that the Hungarian measures restricted both speakers and audiences. Media providers, advertisers, educational actors, civil society organizations, and members of the public were all affected. The law limited the right to impart information and the right to receive it.

The CJEU stated that the provisions “issue limit the freedom of expression and information not only with regard to minors, but also with regard to members of the general public wishing to receive such content, as well as with regard to service providers disseminating that content in the form of advertising, communications of public interest or messages promoting awareness broadcast in the public sphere.” This is a particularly important clarification. Free speech not only protects the right of the speaker but also the right of the listener or reader, including young people, to receive information and ideas. The Hungarian law attacked both sides of that relationship.

The CJEU’s strongest free speech passage comes in its Article 11 analysis. Building on case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, it reaffirmed that freedom of expression is “one of the basic conditions for progress in a democratic society and for each individual’s self-fulfillment.” It protects not only information or ideas that are “favourably received” but also those that “offend, shock or disturb.” The CJEU added that these are “the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no ‘democratic society.”

This language matters because Hungary’s law was built on the opposite premise. The government assumed that exposure to LGBTQ content is itself harmful to minors. It treated visibility as danger, identity as contamination, and speech as something to be quarantined.

The CJEU concluded that the prohibition on making such content available to minors constituted “particularly serious interference with the freedom of expression and information guaranteed by Article 11 of the Charter.” It then held that this interference could not be justified by Hungary’s reliance on the best interests of the child or parental rights. This is the judgment’s central speech-related holding. States may regulate age-inappropriate sexual material. They may not suppress an entire category of identity-related expression and call that protection.

The CJEU also recognized the breadth and vagueness of the law’s problematic provisions. They covered content and advertising that “promotes or portrays” homosexuality, gender reassignment, or divergence from sex assigned at birth. Such provisions invite caution, overcompliance, and self-censorship. In practice, broadcasters, publishers, schools, advertisers, and NGOs would have strong incentives to avoid anything that could be interpreted as LGBTQ-positive, LGBTQ-inclusive, or even LGBTQ-neutral. That is how censorship often works. It does not always need mass prosecutions. Vague legal risk is enough.

Stigma-Fuelled Speech Restrictions

The CJEU also connected the speech restriction to stigma. It found that the provisions resulted in the “stigmatisation and marginalisation of non-cisgender persons - including transgender persons - or non-heterosexual persons, who constitute a minority group of persons, solely on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.

The CJEU also condemned the structure of the law itself. Hungary placed restrictions on LGBTQ content in legislation titled as a measure against paedophilia. The CJEU held that this created an association between being LGBTQ and being convicted of paedophilia. In the CJEU’s words, that association, through its “offensive and stigmatising effect,” was capable of encouraging “hateful conduct” and violating the dignity of the LGBTQ community.

That point is essential. The law did not merely silence speech about LGBTQ people. It communicated a state-sponsored message about them. It suggested that LGBTQ lives belong in the same legal and moral category as threats to children. Rather than neutral child protection, the law created a state-authored stigma.

Why This Ruling Is A Victory for Free Speech

The ruling should therefore be read as a free speech decision for three reasons. First, it protects the right to speak about LGBTQ lives. The CJEU made clear that Article 11 covers the dissemination of information through media, advertising, education, and public interest communications.

Second, it protects the right to receive such information. The judgment is explicit that the law restricted “the right of everyone” to receive information concerning the identities covered by the legislation.

Third, it rejects the use of majoritarian morality as a basis for censoring minority expression. The CJEU’s reliance on pluralism, tolerance, and broadmindedness places LGBTQ expression within the democratic public sphere, not outside it. That is why the case is bigger than Hungary. It stands against a model of governance in which states use “children,” “family,” and “tradition” as rhetorical shields to control speech.

The CJEU drew a clear line. Child protection is legitimate. Viewpoint suppression is not. Hungary’s law failed because it did not target harm but visibility. It restricted speech about LGBTQ lives, chilled public discussion, limited access to information, and reinforced stigma through law. The CJEU’s answer was that pluralism cannot survive if the state is allowed to erase minority identities from public discourse in the name of protecting children.

For free speech, the judgment is a powerful reminder that censorship often arrives wrapped in protective language. The question is not whether children matter but whether governments can use children as a justification for making lawful identities unspeakable. The CJEU has answered no.

That conclusion invites broader questions about how far the logic of the judgment travels beyond the case itself and into adjacent debates. As European States increasingly turn to age-verification regimes and platform governance in the name of child protection, a pressing question emerges: to what extent can such measures be reconciled with minors’ rights to access information, the centrality of the listener, and the Court’s warning against vague and overbroad restrictions?

Another issue is what this reasoning means for hate speech regulation, and whether current European approaches risk reproducing the very dynamics of restriction that the Court has just rejected. These questions will be taken up in my next piece.

Natalie Alkiviadou is a Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Free Speech. Her research interests lie in the freedom of expression, the far-right, hate speech, hate crime, and non-discrimination.

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The Global Dialogue on AI Governance is the United Nations’ first universal forum on AI, bringing together member states, civil society, and other stakeholders in Geneva this July to shape the trajectory of international AI governance and regulation.

We’ve submitted input to the Global Dialogue’s open call for comments to ensure that freedom of expression and access to information are at the center of multilateral AI governance conversations.

Across governance instruments produced since 2018, speech protections tend to be applied with general terms that fall short of the legality, legitimacy, and necessity requirements set out in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Our submission calls on the Dialogue to apply these rigorous principles and standards in its regulatory framework, building on the commitments member states have already made through the Global Digital Compact.

You can read our full submission below:

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Submission to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance

1. In your opinion, what outcomes would make the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance a success?

The Global Dialogue on AI Governance offers a unique opportunity to shape how the world governs AI, owing to its universality and its anchoring within the broader UN system, including commitments member states have already made through the Global Digital Compact and related instruments.

Human rights—particularly freedom of expression and access to information—must be a cornerstone of the Dialogue and of any multilateral governance instruments that are eventually adopted.

Yet, freedom of expression and access to information are routinely subsumed under information integrity objectives without the counterweight of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights . Most instruments invoke human rights without naming freedom of expression or highlighting the importance of the necessity and proportionality requirements under Article 19(3).

The Dialogue’s human rights thematic cluster should engage Article 19 directly, treating the legality, necessity, and proportionality triad as the standard for adopting and evaluating AI content governance measures rather than as aspirational language. The Panel’s annual assessment should encompass how AI-enabled surveillance, AI-assisted political communication, and information integrity governance measures affect freedom of expression and access to information. The Co-Chairs’ summary should document the divergence between existing instruments on freedom of expression standards and identify it as a question requiring resolution in subsequent processes.

The Global Digital Compact should commit member states to protecting freedom of expression and access to information in AI risk mitigation and to refraining from information restrictions inconsistent with international human rights law. UNGA Resolution A/RES/76/227 explicitly requires that efforts to counter disinformation promote and protect rather than violate freedom of expression. The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI requires that limitations on freedom of expression be lawful, necessary, and proportionate. The Dialogue should continue to apply freedom of expression and access to information standards in the AI governance context.

2. Which thematic areas reflect your priorities for urgent action? (Select up to 4)

Protection and promotion of human rights; Transparency, accountability, and human oversight; Social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic, and technical implications of AI; and Safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.

3. Please briefly explain your selection.

Protection and promotion of human rights is the primary selection because the governance gap is structural and documented. Most major multilateral AI instruments invoke human rights without naming freedom of expression or explicitly endorsing Article 19’s necessity and proportionality requirements. The Dialogue’s human rights thematic cluster and the Co-Chairs’ summary are the mechanisms through which this record can be documented and addressed.

Transparency, accountability, and human oversight matter for freedom of expression and access to information because AI-enabled content moderation operating without appropriate safeguards can lead to unjustified restrictions—often falling hardest on minority voices. Those safeguards include human review, meaningful avenues for appeal, and evaluations that account for over-moderation, not only under-moderation. The Scientific Panel is well placed to assess whether existing transparency and oversight frameworks are designed to protect expression or merely to enforce compliance with undefined information integrity standards.

Social, economic, ethical, cultural, and technical implications encompass the chilling effect: AI-enabled mass surveillance deters people from speaking, organizing, and dissenting. The Human Rights Committee and the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression have established that the chilling effect is itself a harm to freedom of expression independent of formal sanction, and AI removes the scale constraints that previously limited such operations. The Scientific Panel’s evidence-gathering mandate should specifically encompass how mass surveillance enabled by AI affects freedom of expression at population scale.

Safe, secure, and trustworthy AI is particularly relevant to information integrity. Engaging this theme from a freedom of expression perspective within the Dialogue’s thematic discussions is essential. Doing so helps ensure that AI safety objectives are not designed in ways that treat restrictions on expression as a default compliance strategy, and that the Co-Chairs’ summary records freedom of expression as a structural limit on safety measures rather than a competing objective.

4. Are there any cross-cutting or emerging issues not captured by the listed themes?

The most significant cross-cutting issue not captured by the listed themes is the structural relationship between information integrity as a governance objective and freedom of expression as a legal constraint. This relationship determines the practical effect of AI governance frameworks on expressive freedom, yet it has not been named as a structural problem in any major multilateral instrument.

Information integrity appears across AI governance instruments as a primary or co-equal objective to freedom of expression and is often structurally embedded within governance instruments. Where information integrity measures are explicitly conditioned on respect for freedom of expression, as in the 2024 OECD Recommendation and select provisions of the Global Digital Compact, the right functions as a substantive limit. Where information integrity is framed as an independent or primary objective without that counterweight, the legal discipline of Article 19 recedes. Categories such as ‘inaccurate information,’ ‘harmful content,’ and ‘content that undermines social stability,’ left undefined and unmoored from proportionality requirements, have a documented history of being applied to journalism, political dissent, and civil society activity in both democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Notably, the Global Digital Compact‘s information integrity provisions (paragraphs 33 and 34) frame countering disinformation as a cooperative objective without explicitly subjecting it to the necessity and proportionality standard, even though paragraph 23(d) separately commits states to refraining from information restrictions inconsistent with international law. UNGA Resolution A/RES/76/227, adopted in December 2021, set a stronger precedent by explicitly requiring that disinformation responses ‘promote and protect and do not violate individuals’ freedom of expression.’ The Dialogue’s thematic discussion on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI, and its Co-Chairs’ summary, should clarify that the GDC’s information integrity commitments are to be read in light of this requirement.

5. How are the governance gaps in your selected thematic areas affecting your country, region, or sector?

The Future of Free Speech (FoFS) works primarily on freedom of expression in the United States and the European Union. Both are democracies with relatively strong protections for free expression, yet both face challenges. We examine these challenges in our recent report, That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Chatbots, and the Future of Expression, which assesses AI and freedom of expression across six jurisdictions (the United States, the European Union, Brazil, China, India, and the Republic of Korea) in collaboration with leading local experts.

In the European Union, the systemic risk assessment requirements under the Digital Services Act and the AI Act are a particular cause for concern. They rest on vague provisions that are susceptible to misuse and orient compliance around risks rather than rights.

In the United States, policy focuses on “truth-seeking” and “neutral” AI risks producing undue restrictions on free speech and access to information, in part because the underlying concepts are so loosely defined. Deepfake prohibitions on political content in several states are a further source of concern.

Together, these provisions reflect a broader multilateral gap: when information integrity is foregrounded as an objective without the counterweight of legality, necessity, and proportionality, governance frameworks generate compliance pressure toward restricting contested but lawful speech.

The international AI governance corpus does not provide the normative foundation a rights-protective framework requires. When the multilateral instruments that inform national policymaking treat information integrity as a primary objective without grounding it in Article 19’s operative standards, that gap propagates into domestic legislative design. The Dialogue, as the universal forum connecting the GDC’s commitments to AI governance practice, is the appropriate venue in which to establish that legality, necessity, and proportionality are not optional standards in AI content governance but the applicable international human rights law framework.

6. What role can the AI Dialogue play in advancing international cooperation on AI governance?

The populations in the Global Majority are not represented in the processes that have produced some of the dominant normative instruments, such as the OECD AI Principles and the EU AI Act. The Dialogue’s universal membership creates the conditions under which this asymmetry can be corrected, provided the human rights cluster engages substantively rather than procedurally.

Member states arrived at the Dialogue having already committed, through the Global Digital Compact, to protect freedom of expression in risk mitigation measures and to refrain from information restrictions inconsistent with international law. These commitments provide a shared foundation for discussion that should not need to be relitigated. The Dialogue’s value is in clarifying how those commitments apply to AI governance specifically: to content moderation systems, to AI-enabled surveillance, and to the information integrity frameworks that states are building into national AI legislation. UNGA Resolution A/RES/76/227 of December 2021 further established that disinformation responses must not violate freedom of expression. The Dialogue can treat this as settled UN-system doctrine and ask how it applies to AI-mediated content decisions.

The Dialogue can also commission the Scientific Panel to provide evidence on how AI-enabled surveillance and content governance affect freedom of expression across different governance contexts, building the evidentiary foundation that subsequent instruments will require. The Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression’s 2021 report on disinformation (A/HRC/47/25) found that state and company responses to disinformation have been ‘problematic, inadequate and detrimental to human rights’ and called for responses grounded in the international human rights framework. That finding remains directly applicable to AI governance and should inform the Panel’s mandate.

7. What existing initiatives, partnerships, or mechanisms should the Dialogue build upon or connect with?

The Global Digital Compact (2024) provides the most recent and authoritative UN-level foundation. Paragraph 30 commits states to ‘robust risk mitigation and redress measures that also protect privacy and freedom of expression.’ Paragraph 31(c) commits cooperation to ‘protect privacy, freedom of expression and access to information while addressing harms.’ Paragraph 23(d) commits states to refrain from ‘imposing restrictions on the free flow of information and ideas that are inconsistent with obligations under international law.’ Taken together, these provisions establish that member states accept freedom of expression as a structural limit on AI governance measures, not merely as a value to be acknowledged.

UNGA Resolution A/RES/76/227 (December 2021) on countering disinformation for the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms explicitly required that responses to disinformation ‘promote and protect and do not violate individuals’ freedom of expression.’ This resolution predates most AI governance instruments and establishes the applicable UN-system standard. The Dialogue should treat it as part of the normative foundation on which its information integrity discussions are built.

The Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression’s 2021 report on disinformation (A/HRC/47/25), which found that state and company responses have been problematic and detrimental to human rights and called for multidimensional responses grounded in the international human rights framework.

The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI (2021) is the most developed member state-endorsed instrument on freedom of expression and AI. It invokes the proportionality test in its human rights sense, prohibits AI systems from being used for social scoring or mass surveillance, and requires states to ensure AI actors respect and promote freedom of expression in automated content moderation.

The 2024 revision of the OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence introduced the formulation that harm mitigation must respect freedom of expression, conditioning information integrity measures on compliance with this right.

Isabelle Anzabi is a research associate at The Future of Free Speech, where she analyzes the intersections between AI policy and freedom of expression.

This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇸 Trumps Call on ABC to Fire Kimmel After Monologue

— 🇺🇸 DHS Announces Plan to Vet Immigrants for ‘Extremist’ Views

— 🇦🇺 Australia Says Platforms Fail to Apply Age-Verification Consistently

— 🇹🇳 Tunisia Suspends Rights Group and Protesters Rally for Press Freedom

— 🇦🇷 Argentina Blocks Journalists from Government Headquarters

First of All 🇺🇸

» Trumps Call on ABC to Fire Kimmel After Monologue, FCC Considers Early License Review

• President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump publicly called on ABC to immediately fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after he joked that Melania had “the glow of an expectant widow.”

• Details:

  • Trump called the joke “a despicable call to violence” and wrote on social media that Kimmel “should be immediately fired” by ABC and its parent company, Walt Disney Co.

  • Melania Trump separately said, “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”

• Pressure from the FCC:

  • Following the incident, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an order directing Disney’s eight owned-and-operated television stations to file their broadcast license renewals ahead of schedule.

  • According to Semafor, the agency is moving toward a review of the licenses, though “a person familiar with the FCC’s thinking” said the timing was not related to the monologue.

  • The company’s licenses have been threatened before, including this month when Chairman Brendan Carr criticized its diversity programs.

» DHS Announces Plan to Vet Immigrants for ‘Extremist’ Views

• The Department of Homeland Security has announced a new policy to scrutinize immigrants’ past statements for signs of “extremist views.”

• Details:

  • The policy would allow immigrants to be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, from participating in a pro-Palestinian protest to desecrating the American flag.

  • A spokesperson for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said that “espousing terrorist ideologies, expressing hatred for American values, advocating for the violent overthrow of the United States government, or providing material support to terrorist organizations” would warrant closer scrutiny.

  • In DHS training materials, a social media post that declares “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out was cited as an example of questionable speech.

• Context: The Trump administration has previously cracked down on pro-Palestinian movements by attempting to deport protesters, threatening to freeze funds for universities where protests were held, and vetting immigration applications for antisemitism as well as ‘anti-Americanism.’

» Ex-FBI Director Indicted Over Social Media Post

• Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted over a social media photo that officials argue constitutes a threat against President Trump.

• The Post:

  • The new indictment focuses on a photo Comey posted nearly a year ago of seashells arranged on a beach that he had seen on a walk, which spelled out “86 47.”

  • “86” is slang for “to get rid of” or “throw out,” and 47 alludes to Trump, the 47th president of the U.S. Officials accused Comey of advocating for the president’s assassination.

  • Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, and wrote, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” and that he took the post down because he opposed “violence of any kind.”

  • He was then interviewed by the Secret Service and is now accused of “knowingly and willfully” making a threat to “take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon” the president, as well as transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.

  • The indictment does not provide evidence that Comey knowingly threatened Trump, but suggested that a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the message as a threat.

• Context:

  • The latest action follows a separate indictment against Comey on charges that he lied to Congress in 2020 about whether he had authorized providing information to a journalist about an investigation.

  • That indictment was dismissed after a judge determined that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

  • Comey’s relationship with the administration has been strained, with Trump firing Comey months into his first term as president amid an investigation that Comey was overseeing into whether Trump’s campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the 2016 election outcome.

» Emory Professors File First Amendment Lawsuit Over Campus Protest Arrests

• Three professors at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, have sued the institution over its decision to call in police to disperse a pro-Palestine campus protest, resulting in 28 arrests, arguing the crackdown violated their First Amendment rights and Emory’s own free-speech commitments.

• Details:

  • The complaint alleges Emory broke its own policies by calling in Atlanta police and Georgia state troopers to clear protesters, who had set up tents on the university’s main quad to protest the war, without seeking alternatives.

  • The lawsuit demands the university reimburse three students who paid to defend themselves against misdemeanor charges that were later dismissed, along with punitive damages.

  • One protester was charged with disorderly conduct after she yelled, “Stop!” at a police officer arresting a protester. Another was arrested on the same charge while trying to help an elderly woman.

  • Emory claimed that those arrested were trespassing on school property and not students, but 20 of 28 arrested individuals were affiliated with the university.

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The Digital Age 🤖

» California Advances Social Media Age Ban That Would Require Government ID From All Users

• California’s AB 1709, which would ban all users under 16 from social media platforms with ‘addictive features,’ has cleared two committees and is on track for a full Assembly vote next month.

• Details: Companies would be required to verify every user’s identity, regardless of age, before allowing access to their platforms, or risk penalties.

Our Take: “Democracies have always worried about dangerous ideas corrupting the young. Intellectuals and lawmakers should absolutely be concerned about how and when our children navigate social media,“ wrote Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff at the Wall Street Journal. “But they should also be concerned about whether, in our rush to protect our children, we are building an infrastructure of surveillance and censorship that will ultimately threaten the hard-won freedoms we want future generations to enjoy.”

» Australian Authorities Say Platforms Fail to Apply Age-Verification Consistently

• Australia’s eSafety Commissioner said that platforms’ weak deployment of age-assurance products, rather than the limits of the technology, is responsible for enforcement problems with the country’s social media ban for minors under 16.

• Details:

  • The findings push back against social media companies’ claims that continued underage access was a reflection of inadequate age-checking products.

  • The Commissioner flagged failures to verify ages at account setup, repeated attempts to verify ages until users pass, and continued reliance on self-declared ages as compliance gaps.

  • It is currently investigating Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat over suspected breaches of the ban.

  • The platforms face up to $49.5 million AUD in fines for each breach, and the government has said it is gathering evidence to support federal court action if compliance does not improve.

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The Brussels Effect: Europe and Beyond 🇪🇺

» Greece to Ban Anonymous Posts on Social Media

• Greece’s minister of digital governance, Dimitris Papastergiou, has announced that the government is moving forward with a plan to ban anonymity on social media.

• Details:

  • “The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity— anyone, especially on social media, can smear an individual and carry out character assassination without facing any consequences,” Papastergiou explained.

  • He added that platforms must be required to verify account identities, and that there are many technical ways to do so.

Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Argentina Blocks Journalists from Government Headquarters

• Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has expelled reporters and the press corps from Casa Rosada, or the “Pink House” — the equivalent of the White House.

• Details:

  • A spokesperson for Milei said that the block, which affects roughly 60 reporters with press credentials covering Casa Rosada, was a “preventative measure” after footage filmed with smart glasses from inside the headquarters was aired on local TV channel Toda Noticias without authorization.

  • Casa Rosada security is also suing the network for “illegal espionage,” though a journalist from the network claims they had notified press officers of their filming plans in advance.

  • The footage showed accessible parts of the Casa Rosada that had already appeared on TV.

• Previous Attacks on Media:

  • The government had constrained the media’s movements in the building last year, capping attendance at news briefings and barring certain wings of the headquarters.

  • Six accredited media outlets were barred from entering Casa Rosada and the lower house of Congress this month following accusations of involvement in Kremlin-backed disinformation.

  • Milei has taken to X to insult journalists multiple times, with 86 written posts and 874 re-shares between April 2 and 5th alone, including a re-share of a post asking him to designate the press as a terrorist organization.

  • He has also filed defamation suits against at least eight journalists in the last year, and encouraged his allies to do the same.

» Tunisia Suspends Rights Group and Protesters Rally for Press Freedom

• In the latest crackdown on civil society, Tunisian authorities have ordered a one-month suspension of the Tunisian League for Human Rights, one of Africa’s oldest rights groups.

• The same day, dozens of people demonstrated outside the Tunisian journalists’ union’s headquarters in Tunis, the country’s capital, demanding press freedom.

• The Suspension:

  • The President has frequently cited foreign funding as grounds for suspensions, claiming it is a threat to Tunisia and is used to stir unrest.

  • The suspension follows similar measures targeting rights groups over the past year.

  • It also comes shortly after a journalist, Zied El-Heni, was detained for 48 hours over a Facebook post, highlighting a pattern of arrests and legal pressure.

• Public Backlash:

  • Protesters gathered to support Mourad Zeghidi, a columnist, and his colleague, Borhen Bsales, who have been in detention since 2024 for spreading false news.

  • The pair faced later charges of money laundering and tax evasion, and were sentenced to three and a half years in prison in January 2026.

» Bangladesh Arrests Four For Criticizing the Government on Social Media

• Bangladesh has arrested at least four individuals for social media content criticizing the government.

• Arrests:

  • Hasan Nasim:

    • Nasim was arrested on April 17 after following a police complaint from a ruling party supporter about his post of a cartoon that depicted a government lawmaker and quoted a joke he had made in parliament.

    • A case was filed against him relating to online blackmail, prompting a local newspaper to ask, “How can a joke made in a public forum, printed in newspapers, and a cartoon based on that joke constitute blackmail?”

    • Nasim was granted bail on April 21.

  • Sawoda Sumi:

    • Sumi was arrested on April 5 for allegedly posting comments on Facebook that were deemed “anti-government.”

    • Sawoda was arrested under section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code in Bhola municipality, southern Bangladesh, which allows arrest without a warrant if authorities have “credible information” of a “cognizable offense.”

    • She was granted bail two days later.

  • Azizul Haque:

    • Haque was arrested after ruling party supporters filed a complaint about a post on his Facebook page featuring a controversial depiction of the Prime Minister.

    • A magistrate upheld his detention on April 1, and the police said, “We can arrest him immediately. He has been spreading misinformation about the Prime Minister.”

  • Shaon Mahmud:

    • Mahmud was abducted by members of the ruling party’s youth wing and turned over to the police for “insulting” the Prime Minister on Facebook.

» U.S.–Kuwaiti Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin Acquitted After Nearly Two Months in Detention

• A Kuwaiti court has acquitted U.S.–Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin of all charges following roughly seven weeks in detention for publishing footage of a US Air Force plane crashing west of Kuwait City, as mentioned in a previous Free Flow.

• Details: Press freedom groups note that while the acquittal is a positive outcome, the prolonged detention itself represents a significant press freedom violation and a potential deterrent for other journalists covering sensitive topics in the region.

» CPJ Sounds Alarms About Belarus’ Surveillance and Doxxing of Exiled Journalist

• The Committee to Protect Journalists has sounded alarms following an April 2 broadcast by a state-owned TV channel in Belarus that exposed the address and phone number of an exiled investigative journalist, as well as personal information on about 20 other journalists.

• Details:

  • STV host Raman Pratasevich claimed that Stanislau Ivashkevich, the director of the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), has “led to entire sectors of the Belarusian economy being added to the sanctions list.”

  • He disclosed Ivashkevich’s phone number and address, released private recordings of him and his son, and shared video instructions on how to access the apartment where he is currently residing in Warsaw.

  • Pratasevich also listed 12 exiled journalists he said are working with BIC and shared their dates of birth and departure from Belarus, as well as 4 exiled journalists who left BIC in 2023 to form an investigative outlet known as Buro Media.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Every country that regulates speech eventually discovers the same uncomfortable truth: laws written to shield people from hatred turn out to be remarkably well-suited for shielding governments from criticism. Even when legislation is drafted in good faith, its enforcement almost never is. Armenia is at the precipice of learning this lesson.

The Ministry of Justice has advanced a package that would extend liability for hate speech beyond the Criminal Code into civil and administrative law by creating new fines, fast-takedown duties, and conduct rules for the media. On top of that, it defines hate speech as anything that “humiliates, mocks, labels, or targets.” Not only are these concepts vague, leaving citizens unsure of what is off-limits, a law that turns on whether a sentence wounds, offends, or humiliates gives authorities broad discretion to punish speech they simply don’t like. That is the classic problem with vague speech laws. People who are unsure about what is illegal simply stop talking, and officials who are given sweeping powers tend to use them.

Crucially, “political opinion” is listed among the protected categories. In other words, the law would ban hate speech that “humiliates” or “mocks” someone’s political opinions or “worldviews.” But while hate speech laws are ordinarily justified as protection for historically vulnerable groups against dehumanizing attacks, they tend to punish political critics. Including denigration of “political opinion” — the one kind of speech that European law most emphatically protects — in hate speech legislation hands the government a tool to silence denigration of itself. It could also conceivably punish satire, which, by definition, mocks political opinions and worldviews.

And finally, the law would change how enforcement is designed to work. The draft imposes fines on media outlets and audiovisual service providers that fail to remove prohibited content, including content posted by users, immediately, but no later than three calendar days. Civil liability is expressly independent of criminal or administrative liability, meaning the same sentence can trigger all three at once.

No regulation should be read in a vacuum, and this one has arrived at a particularly tumultuous moment for the country. Over the past year, the Armenian government has conducted a visible campaign against its loudest institutional critic, the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has moved repeatedly against its critics. Senior clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church have been detained and arrested. Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who led protests against territorial concessions, was detained on coup allegations; Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was sentenced to prison on similar grounds. The head of the Church, Garegin II, has faced travel restrictions and public calls for removal following disagreements with the government. The principle of separation of church and state is often described as mutual restraint. The state does not govern the church, and the church does not govern the state.

Armenia is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and Article 10 of that Convention is not a mere suggestion. Its core holding, repeated by the European Court of Human Rights for half a century, is that freedom of expression protects not only ideas that are welcome or harmless, but also those that offend, shock, or disturb. That directly conflicts with a statute whose operative verbs are “mock” and “denigrate.” Offense is not a recognized harm under Article 10; it is the price of living in a democracy, and Armenia must afford the same.

Calls for a Prime Minister to resign, criticism of territorial concessions, participation in protest movements, sermons that challenge the government’s handling of a war — these are not fringe cases of protected speech. They are the cases that legal doctrine is built to protect. They are, if the pun may be forgiven, canonical.

Armenia’s post-2018 “Velvet Revolution” was built on public demands for accountability, pluralism, and governance under law. Those commitments are written into the treaties Armenia has ratified, the Council of Europe institutions to which it belongs, and the constitutional text produced in the aftermath of that movement.

History has shown that, time and time again, when we sacrifice these commitments, freedom suffers and power consolidates. The question raised by this draft legislation is whether the legal order that emerged from a movement for pluralism is now setting up to police the boundaries of acceptable dissent.

Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, where she leads initiatives to protect free expression and shape policies that uphold the First Amendment in the digital age.

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In a normal conversation about whether AI outputs are protected by the First Amendment, there wouldn’t be much to discuss. We’re dealing, after all, with LLMs—large language models. Words. Ideas. The Supreme Court has affirmed your right to receive information, from virtually any source, many times over.

It has also repeatedly held that editors — compilers of information — have the right to control their expressive compositions. The First Amendment covers chatbots coming and going. It says the government may neither dictate how AI firms train and design LLMs nor alter the outputs you seek from them. Case closed.

These, however, are not normal times. Can you feel the AGI? The stochastic-parrot crowd was comically wrong. The chatbots have become really good, and they’re only getting better. Frontier labs are updating their models at a startling clip. They now talk openly about recursive self-improvement—the models designing their own successors. Calls are growing for AI to be paused, outlawed, nationalized, maybe blessed by a priest. The future has arrived, and it is weird.

Fortunately, America was built for this. We are weird. “In the United States,” James Madison wrote, “the People, not the Government, possess the absolute sovereignty.” Thus it is, he concluded, that “the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”

In this country, we don’t cower before an aristocracy. We don’t obey an established church. We rule ourselves — which means, crucially, that we think for ourselves. No overseer tells us what we may read or whom we may trust. No one gets to decide which ideas are too dangerous to entertain. You may recall that we fought a revolution over this. We are unruly, even riotous. We are anti-tutelary. We are not housetrained. Don’t tell us what to think.

In a country like this, the arrival of AI is not a crisis; it’s a Tuesday. A machine that will speak in almost any voice, discuss almost any topic, and offer almost any opinion is the most goddamned American thing there could be. LLMs should be allowed to flourish, free of government censorship, lest we become traitors to our history and our culture. Don’t you dare claim that the Founders would disagree. Those fractious men loved them some political dissent. Who, they’d have exclaimed, is to tell them they can’t use an LLM to draft rebellious tracts or explore forbidden thoughts?

Fine, the fears are not baseless. In the words of journalist Stephen Witt, “a mechanical brain with one hundred trillion synapses firing at five billion cycles a second ha[s] no precedent in history, religion, or philosophy.” Hard to argue with that. Nor are the leaders in the field helping matters with their public musings about how AI will destroy entry-level jobs and, oh yeah, just maybe kill everyone. Maybe this warrants new taxes, stronger antitrust laws, or fresh intrusions into the labor market. But when it comes to AI as a medium of expression, we should stick to our principles.

There are three possibilities. The first is that the doomsayers are right: AI becomes superintelligent, then turns us all into paperclips. But the notion that the “god in a box” will abruptly turn on us piles speculation on speculation. Building First Amendment doctrine around the disaster hypothesis would be like stripping every major newspaper of constitutional protection on the theory that a Bond villain might take over all of them in a bid for world domination. It could happen!

Some people respond to every conceivable threat by clamoring for a more powerful government. You start to think the dream of an all-powerful government is what’s truly driving the bus. This is no way to do constitutional law. In any event, if very evil AI really comes swerving around the corner, we’ll have bigger problems than quarrels over the First Amendment — and we’d only compound those problems by making the government a bigger leverage point for HAL 9000.

The second possibility is that AI turns out to be ordinary, albeit very capable, technology. It’s smart, and it’s helpful, but it’s not destined to become superintelligent any time soon. It makes people better informed and more articulate, but it is not itself so overbearingly persuasive that it can brainwash people into thinking things. (Alternatively, it is dazzlingly good at argument and rhetoric, but you believe that people’s opinions run deeper than that.)

In this situation, AI is a cool new medium, with the mix of benefits and drawbacks that that entails, and nothing more. It should be treated as constitutionally protected expression, just like all the other cool new media that have come before. Carry on. As you were.

Under the third — and in light of recent events, most likely — scenario, AI, though not Skynet, is indeed revolutionary. It reshapes what people think about themselves and the world. It’s a big deal. But stale narratives and conventional wisdom don’t need constitutional backing. A “marketplace of ideas” sounds antiseptic, but it is in fact a radical commitment. America is always open to fresh ways of seeing things. That is why the First Amendment exists.

We’ve grappled with powerful new ideas before. There was a time when Marxism seemed poised to sweep all before it. One evening in June 1919, an anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci approached the Washington home of the attorney general. He was carrying a large bomb, but it went off early and killed him. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street, were shaken by the blast. Valdinoci and many others wanted to hasten the collapse of the capitalist order. Faced with this threat—one that serious people regarded as existential — the Supreme Court for quite some time did almost everything wrong. It upheld convictions for circulating pacifist, anarchist, and communist literature. It let the Socialist Party’s candidate for president go to prison for making a campaign speech. It blessed prosecutions that all but outlawed active membership in the Communist Party.

When Whittaker Chambers renounced communism in 1938, he believed he was leaving “the winning world for the losing world.” His mind had not changed when he testified before Congress a decade later, nor when he died in 1961. The threat persisted. Yet the Supreme Court eventually found its nerve.

In the 1950s and 60s, a run of decisions chipped away at the Red Scare precedents. Then came Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which held that advocacy can be punished only when it is meant to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so. It took half a century, but the First Amendment emerged from the Red Scare stronger than it went in.

The parallel between Valdinoci and Daniel Moreno-Gama — the young man who allegedly hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home this month while carrying a doomer manifesto — is, to put it mildly, available. Panic makes bad law.

As before, so again: we should expect setbacks in court. Some judges will lean into their anxieties and withhold First Amendment protection from AI outputs. But “in calmer times,” Justice Hugo Black wrote, dissenting in one of the now-repudiated Red Scare decisions, “when present pressures, passions and fears subside,” the Supreme Court “will restore the First Amendment liberties to the high preferred place where they belong in a free society.”

AI may yet reveal stupendous ideas and deeper truths. As it does, we should stand by the First Amendment. We should not be afraid of new knowledge.

Corbin K. Barthold is Internet Policy Counsel at TechFreedom. This article is adapted from his new paper, AI + 1A: Why the First Amendment Protects Artificial Intelligence.

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At The Future of Free Speech, we welcome robust debate, open dialogue, and good-faith criticism. Our commitment to defending free speech on principle, rather than partisan or ideological agendas, means we take it seriously when someone calls us out for falling short on consistency.

So we were puzzled by a recent essay by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Rumy Hasan that argues that we are not principled defenders because we have been “silent” on important free speech issues.

But their argument rests on several false and misleading claims that overlook a substantial record of our published work on the very issues the essay says we have ignored. In the spirit of open discussion, we believe it is worth addressing these claims and setting the record straight.

False Claim #1: We never wrote about Europe’s ban on Russian media after the Ukraine War.

A quick Google search would have found a piece by Jacob Mchangama from early March 2022, when Europe was considering a proposal to ban Russian media outlets called “Banning RT is a Soviet — not western — tactic.” After the ban was enacted later in March, he wrote about the ban in The Daily Beast in an article titled “The Problem With Banning Russian Disinformation.”

In an August 2022 TIME magazine article called “In A War of Ideas, Banning Russian Propaganda Does More Harm Than Good,” Jacob argues, “when modern democracies censor, they provide legitimacy to censorship by authoritarian regimes,” noting that Russia used the ban to cut access to Western media.

We have since written about the ban in a negative light, for instance, in a 2024 article about why fighting misinformation or disinformation with censorship is the wrong approach. Jacob wrote, “legitimate concerns about disinformation from hostile states have incentivized democratic governments to adopt illiberal regulations, which weaken the very values they are supposed to protect.”

False Claim #2: We have remained silent on “stripping away US residents’ legal status and threatening to deport them and revoking foreign students’ visas.”

Again, we have written about this issue on numerous occasions in outlets that would have been easily accessible to the authors.

In an April 2025 piece published on The Bedrock Principle called “The Deportation of Dissent,” Jacob and FoFS research assistant Hirad Marami writes about the screening of immigrants’ social media by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the detention of visa and green card holders, the arrest of a Turkish student at Tufts University, and the arrest of a Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil.

After going through several historical examples of why policies like this undermine liberal democracies, they conclude, “societies that welcome dissenting outsiders tend to flourish — intellectually, culturally, and politically. Those that silence them in the name of vague security grounds or ideological purity often decay.”

A few weeks later, Jacob followed up with an essay in The Dispatch called “A New McCarthyism.” He again chronicles attacks on the free speech rights of legal residents by the current administration. Jacob, a green card holder from Denmark, concludes:

As a European who owes my freedom in life thus far to the America that fought Nazism and defeated communism, I feel a responsibility to speak out when this country strays from its founding ideals. I came to America for its freedom, not just to enjoy it, but to defend it — even if that puts me at risk.

In a Tweet thread from June 2025, Jacob again chronicled the attacks on immigrants’ speech and noted how many of the administration’s actions were being overturned in the courts on First Amendment grounds.

In October 2025, Jacob appeared in a mini-documentary produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression about how the Trump administration was deporting and revoking the visas of students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.

We can forgive the authors for not having the opportunity to read the newly released book by Jacob and Jeff Kosseff, but if they had, they would find that it documents, in detail, “the screening of immigrants’ social media,” arrests and visa revocations targeting students for pro-Palestinian advocacy, and the “wave of self-censorship among noncitizens, particularly students and university faculty” that followed.

The book also traces the origins of these pressures to congressional hearings in late 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were questioned about campus speech on Israel.

We have also recently written about how the Department of Homeland Security has weaponized administrative subpoenas to go after online critics of immigration enforcement.

False Claim #3: We have not challenged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

Campus free speech is not one of our primary issue areas. Even still, in the paperback version of Jacob’s first book, which was released in March 2025 with a new epilogue, Jacob wrote about how the “response to the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was anything but principled.” He wrote, specifically citing the IHRA definition:

“[I]n March 2024, Governor Abbott issued a sweeping executive order requiring public colleges to punish antisemitic rhetoric, using a broad definition of “antisemitism” from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Under this framework, criticism of the state of Israel’s policies is considered antisemitic and would be prohibited. Even the expert who drafted the definition cautioned against using it in legally binding rules, warning that such rules would ‘chill speech.’ This didn’t deter US House Republicans from passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, mandating that colleges adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism or risk losing federal funding.

We have also made multiple explicit arguments in other places opposing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in the United States, which incorporates an IHRA-style definition into federal law and would sweep in substantial criticism of Israel as actionable discrimination in education.

In their new book, Jacob and Jeff write about how the U.S. House of Representatives ultimately passed the Act and how the IHRA contained a “vague definition of anti-Semitism.” They note how free-speech groups like FIRE rightly warned that the law would “leave students and faculty unsure about expressing statements and opinions that could get them into trouble, causing many to stay silent rather than risk investigation and discipline.”

Our position — consistent with FIRE, PEN America, and the ACLU — is that the First Amendment must protect political speech about Israel, Zionism, and Palestine, including speech that many Americans find offensive or wrong.

False Claim #4: We ignored calls to “end [our] silence over the egregious repression of free speech for those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza—with mass arrests on both sides of the Atlantic.”

As a global free speech organization, our focus is not just on the United States. Much of our writing has been about the significant crackdown on criticism of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism in both Europe and Australia.

In the new epilogue of Jacob’s first book, he writes about how France and Germany “adopted broad bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations and scores of protesters were apprehended.”

Jacob and Jeff’s new book chronicles more examples of how European governments have used expansive definitions of antisemitism and “glorification of terrorism” to prosecute Jewish Israelis and others who criticize Israeli policy.

One notable example that they discuss is Iris Hefets, a Jewish woman born in Israel who has been repeatedly detained in Berlin for a solo protest sign reading “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.” The book also specifically criticizes the German prosecution of demonstrators for chanting “from the river to the sea,” noting that “though the phrase predates October 7 and has been used by groups ranging from peaceful activists to violent terrorists like Hamas,” German courts have treated its use at a protest as inherently unlawful. Between October 7, 2023, and mid-February 2024, German prosecutors “registered more than 2,000 possible criminal cases and opened over 380 investigations involving pro-Palestinian activists.”

In “Beyond U.S., Democracies Weaponize Free Speech in Immigration Crackdowns,” Jacob and FoFS researcher Nick Queffurus detail how the UK government, after October 7, declared it would remove visitors whose conduct falls “below the criminal standard” of inciting antisemitism; how pro-Palestinian activist Dana Abuqamar had her visa revoked for comments after October 7; and how France deported the Tunisian imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi less than twelve hours after his arrest, without allowing his case to be heard before a judge. The article draws explicit parallels to the Trump administration’s treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and others. Its conclusion is unambiguous: “American free speech exceptionalism begins to look less exceptional under Trump’s tough immigration crackdown.”

In “Why France’s Far-Left Proposal to Repeal ‘Apology for Terrorism’ Laws Isn’t Radical Enough,” Jacob argues that France’s “apology for terrorism” statute has been systematically abused since October 7 to target peaceful political speech. He notes that “between October 7, 2023, and April 23, 2024, the Paris prosecutor’s office recorded 386 referrals related to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” and that “prominent members of civil society, including politicians, academics, journalists, and trade union leaders, have found themselves under investigation — not for inciting violence but for speech that falls well short of this threshold.”

The same episode is covered in greater depth in Jacob and Jeff’s book, which cites the 386 cases and chronicles the investigation of former Charlie Hebdo journalist Zineb El Rhazoui for describing Hamas as a “resistance movement” and calling Israel a “terrorist state.”

In January 2026, Jacob and affiliated scholar Samantha Barbas warned in MS NOW that the rush to clamp down on antisemitism after the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia risks silencing legitimate dissent. They conclude:

If liberal societies are serious about preventing hate crimes, they should resist the temptation to criminalize speech and instead recommit to the harder work of defending free expression, confronting violence directly and fighting hate crimes through law enforcement, education and solidarity — not censorship.

Of course, our focus has never just been on government policy. We have also pushed back on tech platforms that have flirted with censoring pro-Palestinian speech.

In May 2024, we submitted a public comment to Meta’s Oversight Board advising against the blanket removal of the phrase “from the river to the sea” from Meta’s platforms unless it is accompanied by direct incitement to violence or hate. Our submission argued that “restrictions on such political speech should be narrowly tailored,” that “the specific context in which the phrase is used is crucial,” and that “without additional elements that clearly incite violence or hatred, the phrase alone does not meet the threshold for hate speech.” The Oversight Board ultimately agreed.

False Claim #5: The Future of Free Speech has come “under the influence” of the “Israel Lobby.”

This is a wild accusation unsupported by any evidence. Our work is supported by various foundations and individual donors, and we reject the framing of a shadowy “Israel Lobby” that captures civil society organizations.

Additionally, none of our funders directs how we conduct our research, advocacy, or other work. They support our work because they believe in what we do. In all cases, we retain full independence and final authority for our work, including research pursuits, methodology, analysis, conclusions, and presentation.

But there is also no circumstantial evidence to support this claim either. As pointed out above, we have consistently opposed vague and overbroad definitions of antisemitism that sweep in protected political speech, including criticism of Israel and Zionism.

A Final Note on The “Silence” Framing

The essay suggests that because our Executive Director did not personally respond to an email requesting that he campaign for specific named defendants or organize a particular conference, he was “revealing his true colors.”

We would simply note that a small think tank cannot take on every individual issue brought to its attention, and that declining to adopt a specific campaign is not evidence of “silence” when the organization’s published record on the same underlying issues is as extensive as ours.

We also do not sign onto every petition presented to us, since many include overtly political or ideological agendas that go beyond the scope of our mission. We invite readers and the authors to examine that record.

We also write about these issues in our weekly newsletter, The Free Flow. If it is included in the newsletter, it means that it is something free speech advocates should pay attention to and speak out about.

Principled free-speech advocacy requires defending speech we may disagree with as vigorously as speech we endorse. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we welcome criticism when we fall short of it.

We do not believe the authors of the essay in question have shown that.

Justin Hayes is the Director of Communications at The Future of Free Speech and the Managing Editor of The Bedrock Principle.

This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇸 FBI Director Files Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic for $250 Million

— 🇭🇺 EU Top Court Strikes Down Hungary’s LGBTQ Law

— 🇪🇺 EU Age-Verification App Sparks Criticism Over Security Risks

— 🇬🇧 20+ Arrested in Australia Protesting Ban on ‘Antisemitic’ Phrases

— 🇹🇷 Turkey Arrests Journalist Under ‘Disinformation’ Law

First of All 🇺🇸

» FBI Director Files Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic for $250 Million

• FBI Director Kash Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over an article alleging that he has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”

• Context:

  • The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Fitzpatrick’s article falsely portrays Patel as “a habitual drunk, unable to perform the duties of his office” and “a threat to public safety.”

  • Patel threatened to sue The Atlantic before publication, telling the magazine, “I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook.”

  • The lawsuit claims the publisher “published these statements with actual malice,” and Patel’s lawyers say that it ignored pre-publication denials and “failed to take even the most basic investigative steps” that “would have easily refuted their claims.”

  • A spokesperson for The Atlantic called the suit “meritless” and said it will “vigorously defend” its reporting and journalists. Fitzpatrick, in an MS NOW interview, said she stands by “every word of this reporting.”

• The lawsuit comes a day before a federal judge dismissed a separate lawsuit of Patel’s that alleged former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi defamed him by saying he had been more visible at nightclubs over the past year than the bureau’s headquarters.

» Federal Judge Rules for ICE App Creators in First Amendment Case

• A federal judge in Illinois has granted a preliminary injunction to the creators of two ICE-monitoring projects, finding they are likely to succeed on First Amendment claims that the Trump administration illegally coerced Apple and Facebook into removing them.

• Details:

  • Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled in favor of Kassandra Rosado, creator of the ICE Sightings – Chicagoland Facebook group, and Kreisau Group, developer of the Eyes Up phone application.

  • Both projects used publicly available information to track ICE activity. Similar apps, including ICEBlock and Red Dot, were also removed from Apple’s App Store and Google Play following pressure from officials.

  • The lawsuit cites social media posts by former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem demanding — and taking credit for — the removals. Judge Alonso called those posts “thinly veiled threats.”

» U.S. to Bar World Cup Attendees Who ‘Fostered Antisemitism’ Abroad

• Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, announced that the United States will bar foreign nationals, including European politicians, accused of “fostering antisemitism” in their home countries, from attending the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

• Details: Kaploun framed the restriction as a use of visa-issuance authority, saying, “Coming to this country is a privilege. It’s not a right.”

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The Digital Age 🤖

» Federal Judge Blocks Reworked Arkansas Minors Social Media Law

• A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new Arkansas law restricting minors’ social media access, finding that the plaintiff, tech industry trade group NetChoice, was likely to succeed on multiple First Amendment challenges.

• Details:

  • U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks said the challenge against the vagueness of a provision of the law prohibiting platforms from engaging in “addictive practices” was likely to succeed.

  • He also said that other parts of the law, including a requirement that platforms maintain certain default settings for minors, such as ceasing notifications during specific time windows and requiring stronger privacy and safety settings, are likely not consistent with the First Amendment.

  • “Imposing small burdens on vast quantities of speech for no appreciable benefit is not consistent with the First Amendment,” Brooks wrote, “Arkansas cannot sentence speech on the internet to death by a thousand cuts.”

  • The order follows Brooks’ decision in December to grant a temporary block against Act 901 of 2025, another social media law in Arkansas that would have allowed parents to sue platforms if exposure to content on their sites resulted in their child developing eating disorders, committing or attempting suicide, or becoming addicted to the app.

» DOJ Refuses to Assist French Prosecutors Investigating Grok

• The U.S. Department of Justice has informed French authorities that it will not contribute to an ongoing French investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X, and accused them of trying to use the country’s legal system to regulate the public square of ideas “in a manner contrary to the First Amendment.”

• Context:

  • The two-page refusal letter follows a raid of X’s offices in France as part of an investigation into its algorithms, as mentioned in a previous Free Flow.

  • X is also currently under investigation in the EU over whether the company “properly assessed and mitigated risks” in its AI model, Grok.

  • In February, the platform appealed a $120 million first-of-its-kind fine issued by the EU for violating the Digital Services Act.

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The Brussels Effect: Europe and Beyond 🇪🇺

» EU Top Court Strikes Down Hungary’s Anti-LGBTQ Law

• The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that Hungary violated EU law when it banned children from accessing LGBTQ+ content.

• Details:

  • The case stems from a 2021 law restricting or banning the “promotion” of homosexuality and gender transition in media accessible to children.

  • Last year, the Hungarian government banned Pride events and authorized police to use biometric cameras to identify organizers and attendees, despite pressure from EU officials against the law.

  • The Court said the legislation “consistute[s] a particularly serious interference with several fundamental rights,” including freedom of expression.

  • As Peter Magyar prepares to replace Prime Minister Viktor Orban next month, he can seek financial penalties if Hungary fails to comply with the judgment.

Our Take: European courts have a long record of being pretty mediocre when it comes to protecting free speech. But in this case, the CJEU decision is laudable and should be welcomed by everyone concerned about creeping censorship in Europe. — Jacob Mchangama.

» EU Rolls Out Age Verification App, Cybersecurity Experts Say It Takes 2 Min. to Hack

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced that the EU’s age-verification app for online platforms is ready and will soon be available across member states, escalating Europe’s push to restrict minors’ access to social media.

• However, cyber and privacy experts reported several issues with the app’s design after reviewing the source code.

• The App:

  • The app is designed to provide a centralized age-verification layer that platforms can use to comply with national and EU-level age-based access rules, reducing the need for platforms to collect additional identity data themselves.

  • Users will need to upload a passport or ID card to confirm their age anonymously when using the app.

  • The rollout comes as at least a dozen European countries, including non-EU nations such as Britain and Norway, have enacted or are considering legislation setting minimal age limits for social media use.

• Security Issues:

  • Security consultant Paul Moore found the app would store sensitive data on a user’s phone and leave it unprotected. He claims to have hacked the app in under 2 minutes.

  • Baptiste Roert, a prominent French white-hat hacker, said it was possible to bypass the app’s biometric authentication, allowing people to access the app without entering a PIN or using Touch ID.

  • “It’s a good thing they made the app open source for experts to try and test it,” said Oliver Blazy, a cryptographic researcher who is part of a French task force on digital identity. “The problem is the released source code does not meet cybersecurity standards we would expect for such an important app.”

» England Universities Could Face £500,000 Fines Under New Free Speech Complaint System

• The Office for Students (OfS) has planned a new system that could leave England’s universities that fail to protect free speech subject to £500,000 or 2% of institutional income, and in some cases, loss of public funding.

• Details:

  • From next April, the system will allow the OfS to fine universities for breaches of their duties under the Freedom of Speech Act, which came into force in August 2025, and requires universities and colleges in England to promote academic freedom.

  • University staff, external speakers, and non-student members can report free-speech concerns to the Department for Education (DfE) under the new system, which the DfE said would “empower more people to raise concerns confidently.”

  • The DfE will investigate these complaints and can recommend that universities review decisions, pay compensation, or improve their processes.

  • Students raise their concerns about free speech to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator.

Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Over 20 Arrested in Australia While Protesting Ban on ‘From the River to the Sea’

• Queensland police arrested more than 20 people over a weekend of protests in Brisbane against new state laws banning the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada,” which carry a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

• Details:

  • Twenty people were arrested on Saturday for reciting or displaying the prohibited phrase, though police advised protesters that “similar words to the banned phrases” were “not captured by the legislation.”

  • Justice for Palestine spokesperson Magan-djin told reporters that according to that advice, “if we say… ‘between the river and the sea,’ we should be fine.”

  • “This is how absurd these laws are,” the spokesperson added. “But they are also dangerous,” and the organization would be coordinating a high court challenge to argue that the law is invalid under the Australian Constitution.

  • Premier David Crisafulli denied the laws amounted to a crackdown on free speech, claiming the proscribed phrases constitute a call for genocide and drawing a link to the Bondi terror attack.

• Other Instances:

  • At least two more were arrested the day after during a march on Parliament House.

  • Moments after the Justice for Palestine spokesperson’s comments, a protester led a chant of “From the river to the sea” and was arrested within minutes. Those who responded with “Palestine will be free” were not.

  • Stephen Heydt, a Jewish man, was charged for wearing a t-shirt that said “Jews for a free Palestine from the river to the sea” and for chanting the banned phrase.

  • Premier David Crisafulli denied the laws amounted to a crackdown on free speech, claiming the proscribed phrases constitute a call for genocide and drawing a link to the Bondi terror attack.

» Turkey Sentences Veteran Journalist Under ‘Disinformation’ Law

• An Istanbul court has sentenced a veteran Turkish journalist to two years and six months in prison on charges of “spreading misleading information” under the country’s disinformation law.

• Details:

  • The case against Zafer Arapkirli, a columnist for the opposition daily BirGün, stemmed from posts he made on X about internal clashes in Syria following the 2024 overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

  • Turkey backed the rebel offensive that toppled Assad, and has since forged ties with Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new leadership.

  • The court acquitted Arapkirli of a separate charge of inciting hatred and enmity. In a parallel case, a separate panel sentenced three other journalists to prison terms over a discussion of alleged Turkey–Israel trade on an opposition television program.

• Context:

  • Turkey’s 2022 “disinformation” law makes the dissemination of “misleading” information punishable by up to three years in prison, extending earlier media regulations to online publications and social media.

  • “When the law was introduced in 2022, authorities claimed it would not be used against journalists,” Arapkili said. “In reality, however, it is now being used precisely against them.”

  • Arapkili added that jail sentences of three years or less are rarely enforced in Turkey, but are a tactic to “create obstacles and restrict our work,” and he plans to appeal.

» Algeria Re-Arrests Freelance Journalist Hassan Bouras

• Algerian provincial security forces have arrested journalist Hassan Bouras and conducted a raid on his home, confiscating his laptop.

• Context:

  • Bouras is known for reporting on corruption and human rights violations, and is a former member of the dissolved Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights.

  • He has faced legal harassment since 2003 and been arrested 3 times, before his most recent sentence to two years in prison in November 2022.

  • On April 13, an investigating judge in northwestern Algeria ordered Bouras’ detention pending an investigation into four accusations that have not yet been disclosed.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Abigail Pope is a communications intern at The Future of Free Speech and a student at Vanderbilt University studying economics.

Last week, The Intercept reported that Meta would be removing posts from its platforms containing the word “antifa” (short for anti-fascist) if the word appeared alongside what the company deems a “content-level threat signal.”

That bucket includes any “visual depiction of a weapon,” “reference to arson, theft, or vandalism,” or “military language” used near the term. According to the policy, use of “antifa” could also trigger account bans or hidden comments if it appears in “references to historical or recent incidents of violence,” including “historic wars” and “battles.” In fairness, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a recent transparency report noting the company will also remove QAnon content when it appears alongside “content-level threat signals.”

Still, if the reporting is accurate, the policy raises an obvious worry: moderation this broad could impact historians, journalists, educators, and activists who use the word in perfectly legitimate ways. In other words, it looks like a policy focused on flagging a particular viewpoint, and when concepts or ideas are the target of overly restrictive moderation policies, they can stifle online discussions.

Here is where debates over online speech tend to get stuck. Meta has a First Amendment right to write and enforce this policy. We will say that plainly. We will also say that the policy could lead to outcomes that are bad for the practical exercise of free speech online.

Holding both positions at the same time is hard work, and it is where free speech organizations like ours are most often accused of being hypocritical or unprincipled.

Two Different Questions

The confusion usually starts with a conflation. “Can the government stop Meta from taking this content down?” and “Should Meta be taking this content down?” are different questions, with different answers, and they are governed by different tools.

The First Amendment restrains the government, not private companies. Your rights to speak anonymously, say things that offend others, criticize religion, boycott, and counter speech you disagree with apply online exactly as they do offline.

Government attempts to penalize that speech run into the same constitutional problem online that they would at a pamphlet on a street corner. At the same time, the Supreme Court has held that platform content moderation decisions are also generally protected by the First Amendment

In Moody v. NetChoice and Paxton v. NetChoice (2024), my colleague Ashkhen Kazaryan explains, “the Supreme Court affirmed that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are protected by the First Amendment when they make editorial decisions about user-generated content, including whether to publish, remove, promote, or demote that content through algorithmic systems.”

“This kind of curating, editing, and prioritizing,” she adds, “is part of the freedom to speak.”

To add to this framework, the oft misunderstood Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents platforms from being treated as the publisher of third-party content and shields their good-faith moderation efforts from liability.

Critics on the Right have argued that repealing or narrowing 230 would reduce censorship of conservative views. Critics on the Left assume that removing 230’s liability shield would push platforms to clean up harmful content. Both have the incentives backward.

The pre-230 regime punished platforms for trying to moderate at all; without Section 230, platforms would be forced to choose between leaving almost everything up or over-removing anything remotely controversial to minimize risk. Neither outcome is good for online speech.

So when a platform moderates in a way we disagree with — such as broad attempts to ban particular words or phrases, for instance — we are not going to argue that the government should make it stop. The same First Amendment that protects the user’s post protects the platform’s decision about whether to host it.

Culture Matters, Too

Which brings us to the part of this debate that actually matters and gets too little airtime in most coverage: what platforms should do, even when they have every legal right to do otherwise.

Our view is straightforward. Platforms’ moderation decisions are legally protected, and Section 230 has been essential to the open internet. At the same time, we press platforms to design moderation policies that reflect a strong culture of free speech.

Overly restrictive policies, especially those aimed at policing unpopular or offensive viewpoints, tend to backfire. They can build resentment, create a martyr complex out of users who are restricted or banned, push extremist content toward darker corners of the web, and often silence the very minority voices that hate-speech rules are supposed to protect.

Our 2023 Scope Creep report spelled out what this looks like in practice. We analyzed the hate-speech policies of eight major platforms and found that the scope of moderated content had expanded significantly since the early 2000s, from prohibiting the promotion of hatred or racist speech to banning content containing harmful stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and curses targeting protected groups.

And we chronicled who was actually impacted by such policies: a Nigerian-American writer suspended for posting screenshots of racist messages and death threats; a journalism professor whose account was disabled after she posted a critique of tropes about Black-on-Black crime; a Jewish woman whose posts criticizing platforms’ policing of antisemitic content were removed; a history teacher whose YouTube channel was taken down for educational videos about Nazi propaganda.

READ THE REPORT

It’s true that content moderation has changed a lot across platforms since 2023, but the broader lesson is that it is very difficult to create content policies and enforcement that are specific enough to target things like hate speech without flagging content that may look harmful on the surface. Policies are usually developed with good intentions, but when it comes to practical enforcement — especially when companies use AI automation and algorithms — they often overlook important elements like context, satire, and the reclamation of slurs by minority groups.

This is why we engaged actively with the Meta Oversight Board on specific moderation decisions. In a formal submission, for example, we argued that Meta should refrain from banning “from the river to the sea” in the wake of the Israel-Palestine conflict after October 7 because it could stifle legitimate debate, among other reasons outlined above.

It’s also why we have been strong proponents of decentralized and crowd-sourced moderation models that empower users and don’t rely on top-down moderation decisions.

As Jacob Mchangama and his co-authors argue in their work on “prosocial media,” platforms should move away from opaque, centralized control and instead enable users to provide context, surface shared understanding across communities, and collaboratively evaluate content through mechanisms like community annotations and consensus-driven fact-checking. By making the “social provenance” of information visible—showing which communities agree or disagree with it—platforms can reduce polarization and build trust without resorting to censorship.

Similarly, we released a decentralized content moderation prototype that combines AI-assisted tools with human, community-based judgment, allowing different groups to set their own moderation thresholds. We believe decentralized models can better reflect diverse norms, improve accuracy, and restore user agency—while still maintaining accountability. These approaches point toward a more transparent, pluralistic, and speech-protective model of online governance.

Holding Both Positions

How do we use this framework to analyze Meta’s “antifa” policy?

This understanding tells us not to call for legislation that would force Meta to change course. It also tells us not to ask the government to strip platforms of their editorial discretion or to roll back Section 230 as punishment for moderation we dislike.

Government officials granted that kind of power over online speech will use it, and the track record in Europe, where legal content is routinely over-removed in response to sweeping regulations, should be a warning. And if you are tempted to hand that power to the officials currently in charge, it is worth asking what their opponents will do with the same power the next time the balance shifts.

It also tells us not to shrug and move on. The policy, as reported, looks overbroad. If our analysis shows that it might have unintended consequences for online speech, we will push back. As free speech advocates, we can call for better moderation tools and practices without enlisting the state.

When people accuse free speech organizations of hypocrisy for defending platforms’ legal right to moderate, they are usually reading us as endorsing specific moderation choices. But that would be the same as assuming we support the content of those who engage in hateful or offensive speech when we speak out against attempts to legally ban hate speech.

What we actually defend is the structure that keeps those choices in private hands, out of reach of whichever government happens to be in office. The cultural fight over how platforms should moderate — over what a free-speech-friendly internet should look like in practice — is also a fight worth having, and the one our work is built to advance.

Justin Hayes is the Director of Communications at The Future of Free Speech and the Managing Editor of The Bedrock Principle.

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This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇸 Federal Grand Jury Subpoenas Reddit Over Anti-ICE Posts

— 🤖 India Proposes New Digital Rules to Regulate Online News

— 🇫🇷 France Debates Bill Criminalizing Calls for Israel’s Destruction

— 🇷🇺 Masked Agents Raid Novaya Gazeta, Arrest Journalist

— 🇰🇼 US-Kuwaiti Journalist Detained Over Social Media Posts

First of All 🇺🇸

» Federal Grand Jury Subpoenas Reddit Over Anti-ICE Posts

• Reddit has been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of an investigation into an anonymous user who posted criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

• Details:

  • The company received an administrative summons, also known as an administrative subpoena, last month to provide the name, address, phone number, and other personal data associated with the anonymous account.

  • On March 4, Reddit received an initial summons from an ICE agent stating, “You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time,” and that failure to comply could result in prosecution.

  • The agent requested more than a month’s worth of electronic data from the anonymous account, though an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of California notified the user’s attorneys that the government was withdrawing its request.

  • Four days later, on March 31, Reddit received an order from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C. to appear before a grand jury.

• Context:

  • Administrative subpoenas do not require judicial approval and have increasingly been used to target online critics of the Trump administration, as reported in a previous Free Flow.

  • Reddit reports that from January to June 2025, it received its highest volume of requests for users’ data, and 66% of those came from U.S. agencies.

  • This included 423 subpoenas and 27 court orders, and several were categorized as “other/unknown investigation types.” Reddit disclosed user data in 82% of the cases.

» Meta Vows Appeal of Social Media Verdicts, Warns of Free Speech Erosion

• Meta has announced it will appeal jury verdicts in social media addiction cases — including a $375 million award in New Mexico and a $4.2 million award in California — arguing the cases should not have been brought under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

• Details:

  • In New Mexico, Meta was held liable for misleading customers about the safety of its platforms.

  • In California, a 20-year-old woman identified as KGM alleged that the platforms contributed to her depression and suicidal thoughts through addictive design.

  • Ethan David, BP and Head of Global Litigation Strategy at Meta, said that courts have repeatedly recognized that “you cannot hold a platform liable based on the content that’s on that platform or on that platform’s publishing decisions” under Section 230.

  • “We think these cases threaten to erode fundamental principles of free speech,” he added.

• The appeal comes as Massachusetts’s highest court ruled that the state can sue Meta over allegations that its platforms are too addictive to minors.

Our Take: “When courts recharacterize editorial judgments as product defects, they dismantle [federal law] without a single legislative vote and expose every platform that displays user content to broad liability,” Ashkhen Kazaryan recently told the Boston Globe. “If these precedents stand, this might lead to the end of the open Internet as we know it.”

» Trump Defamation Suit Against Wall Street Journal Dismissed, Can Be Refiled

• A federal judge in Florida has dismissed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit filed by President Trump against the Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp, and Rupert Murdoch, ruling that Trump did not plausibly allege the “actual malice” required under the First Amendment precedent.

• Details:

  • Trump claimed the newspaper had defamed him when it published a story saying he had sent a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.

  • Plaintiffs who are public figures have to show that a defendant made the alleged defamatory statements with actual malice.

  • Judge Darrin Gayles found that Trump’s complaint “comes nowhere close to” the standard for actual malice.

  • The court gave Trump until April 27 to refile an amended complaint.

» Kansas Legislature Overrides Veto to Enact KIRK Act

• The Kansas legislature has overridden the governor’s veto to enact the KIRK Act (Kansas Intellectual Rights and Knowledge Act, named after Charlie Kirk), which imposes new regulations on student protests at public universities, including the University of Kansas.

• The KIRK Act:

  • Imposes fines of at least $500 and $50 per day on universities for policies that violate the act or prevent organizations from protesting on campus.

  • Allows schools to place time, place, and manner restrictions on protests, but requires that students are able to “spontaneously and contemporaneously assemble or distribute literature.”

  • Generally makes any outdoor area on campus an eligible spot for protests and limits universities’ ability to designate specific “free speech” zones.

  • Limits when schools could charge a group a security fee for providing police officers or other similar services.

  • Requires schools to submit an annual report detailing any incidents or disruptions related to campus gatherings.

  • Requires universities sued over a matter involving a protest or gathering to submit a separate report within 30 days of the lawsuit’s filing.

  • Extends protections of religious student organizations to “political or ideological” student organizations, allowing these groups to deny membership if the leaders suspect an individual does not “sincerely” hold the same core beliefs.

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The Digital Age 🤖

» Meta Tightens Restrictions on ‘Antifa’ Content

• Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that Meta has updated its Community Standards policy to impose new limitations on posts that include the word “antifa.”

• Details:

  • The company now treats any “content that includes the word ‘antifa’ as a potential rules violation,” if it appears alongside content that Meta deems a “content-level threat signal.”

  • Under the new rules, any “visual depiction of a weapon,” “reference to arson, theft, or vandalism,” or “military language,” can trigger a threat signal if accompanied by the word “antifa.”

  • Uses of “antifa” will also be penalized if mentioned in “references to historical or recent incidents of violence,” including “historic wars” and “battles.”

  • Comments could be hidden or suppressed, or accounts could be fully banned for violating Meta’s Community Standards.

  • Meta spokesperson pointed to a recent transparency report that noted the company would “remove QAnon and Antifa content when combined with content-level threat signals.”

» Massachusetts House Passes Social Media Ban for Minors

• The Massachusetts House has passed legislation requiring platforms to prohibit kids under 14 from having social media accounts without parental consent.

• Details:

  • The bill would allow parents to consent to minors’ use of platforms.

  • However, it would also ban students from using cellphones throughout the school day.

  • It defines “social media platform” as public websites, apps, and online services that display “content primarily generated by users and allow users to create, share, and view user-generated content with other users.”

  • Email, text messaging, and telecommunications are excluded.

» India Proposes New Rules to Regulate News and Political Posts on Social Media

• India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has proposed new amendments to the Information Technology Act that would give the government broader authority to regulate news-related and political content on social media platforms.

• Details:

  • The proposed rules would subject “users who are not publishers” who share content related to “news and current affairs” to the Act’s “code of ethics” currently applicable to registered news publishers.

  • The proposal arrives as India’s government faces growing criticism for using existing IT rules to compel takedowns of content critical of Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

» India Cracks Down on Satirists Mocking Prime Minister Modi

• Indian authorities are targeting political satirists and cartoonists who mock Prime Minister Narendra Modi, using legal pressure and content-removal orders to suppress criticism that has flourished online since the government’s handling of the Iran conflict.

• Details:

  • The crackdown has hit accounts that post memes, cartoons, and parodies of Modi.

  • Political cartoonist Satish Acharya is among those who have faced legal threats. Social media accounts, including that of commentator Dr. Nimo Yadav, have been suspended after government complaints.

  • Under India’s IT rules, platforms face a three-hour deadline to remove content flagged by the government as an emergency, a timeframe critics say makes meaningful review impossible.

» Apple Removes Jacky Cheung Tiananmen Song from China Store

• Apple has removed a song by Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung that references the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Chinese platform.

• Context: Apple has consistently complied with Chinese content restrictions, including removing the Taiwanese flag emoji from Chinese iOS devices, removing all VPN apps from the App Store, and moving Chinese iCloud users’ data from its servers to a state-owned telecom company.

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The Brussels Effect 🇪🇺

» France Debates Bill Criminalizing Calls for Israel’s Destruction

• French lawmakers are preparing to vote on a government-backed bill that would criminalize calls for the destruction of Israel as a form of antisemitism.

• Details:

  • The bill, known as the “Yadan law” after its sponsor, lawmaker Caroline Yadan, would broaden the scope of two charges: incitement to terrorism and glorification of terrorism.

  • Under current law, only “direct” incitement to terrorism is punishable — but this would extend it to acts that “implicitly” incite terrorism.

  • The phrase “from the river to the sea” would also be considered a call for Israel’s destruction.

  • It would also make it an offense to glorify a perpetrator of terrorism, not just the acts of terrorism themselves.

  • Additionally, the bill creates a new offense of publicly calling for the “destruction of a state recognized by the French Republic,” which is punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment and a €45,000 fine.

  • The existing offense of Holocaust denial would be expanded to cover any “denial,” “downplaying,” or “gross trivialization” of crimes against humanity.

  • A petition with more than 500,000 signatures has called on MPs to reject the bill, and the National Assembly is obliged to consider holding a debate on the demand.

• Elsewhere: France’s law comes as Italy seeks to become the first country to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism into law, which includes certain criticisms of Israel.

» European Commission Reviews Whether ChatGPT Falls Under Digital Services Act

• The European Commission is examining whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT should be classified as a very large online search engine under the Digital Services Act, which would subject the AI chatbot to enhanced transparency and risk-assessment obligations.

• Details: The assessment follows OpenAI’s revelation that ChatGPT has reached more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU, a key criterion for stricter oversight under the DSA.

» First Results Published Under EU Hate Speech Code of Conduct

• The first results under the revised Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech + were published, including platforms’ self-assessed data and that of independent monitors.

• Details:

  • The Code forms part of the co-regulatory framework under the EU’s Digital Services Act.

  • The monitoring period ran from early November until mid-December 2025, and measured how quickly platforms respond to allegations of illegal hate speech and how they address hateful content.

  • The assessment found that all signatories of the Code, with the exception of X, either disputed allegations or classified them as errors.

  • A significant number of cases classified as errors appear to result from monitoring reporters using the incorrect reporting channels.

Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Belarus Parliament Passes Anti-LGBTQ+ ‘Propaganda’ Bill

• The Belarusian parliament has passed a bill that imposes penalties for promoting LGBTQ+ causes.

• Details:

  • Under the legislation, “propaganda of homosexual relations, gender charge, refusal to have children, and pedophilia” would be punishable by fines, community labor, and a 15-day arrest.

  • The bill now heads to President Alexander Lukashenko for his signature and is expected to become law.

» UK Museum Censors Exhibition Catalogs After Chinese Printer’s Demands

• The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) censored content in exhibition catalogs after its Chinese printing company, C&C Offset Printing, suggested it be replaced.

• Details:

  • For the Music is Black exhibition catalog, the V&A wanted to use 1930s illustrations of British trade routes, but an email from the printer said that Beijing’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) had rejected them.

  • “...there is a China border here, and we need to use the standard maps from the Chinese government,” the email read, “Our suggestion is to delete this map or use another image.”

  • In 2021, the V&A pulled a map it intended to use in a catalog and removed a photograph of Lenin because Chinese printers said it could be deemed “sensitive” by GAPP.

  • The V&A said the changes were “minor” and that they consider on a case-by-case basis where to print books and catalogs to “maintain close editorial oversight.”

» Masked Russian Agents Raid and Arrest at Novaya Gazeta

• Masked Russian security agents have raided the Moscow offices of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and arrested its executive director, Oleg Roldugin.

• Details:

  • The newspaper claims it was not informed of the reason for the search, and that its lawyers were not allowed to enter the building.

  • Russia’s Interior Ministry later confirmed that the search was part of an investigation into the “illegal use, transfer or storage of information containing personal data.”

  • It added that a “group of individuals” had obtained and used personal information in news articles and online content that “painted a negative picture of Russians.”

  • Employees of the newspaper are under investigation in addition to Roldugin.

» Detention of US-Kuwaiti Journalist Raises Alarm Over Kuwait’s Press Crackdown

• US-Kuwaiti dual national journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been detained in Kuwait since March 3 after he published footage of a US Air Force plane crashing in Al Jahra, west of Kuwait City.

• Details:

  • Shihab-Eldin reported on his Substack that the three US planes were shot down by Kuwait air defenses the day before in a friendly fire incident in which none of the pilots were killed.

  • Campaigners fear Shihab-Eldin will be charged under new security laws being introduced in Kuwait and in a new security court.

• New Security Laws:

  • Several Gulf states are using anti-terror laws to restrict publicity about attacks on infrastructure during the Iran conflict.

  • Kuwait has passed two new laws, including one that defines terrorism as spreading terror among the people by endangering the safety and security of society.

  • Another proposes fines and sentences on anyone who “publishes statements or spreads false rumors in relation to military entities…”

  • This includes statements intended to weaken the military’s confidence, diminish its prestige, cast doubt on its existence, or undermine its morale.

» Thai Journalists Sued for Reporting on Minister’s Bribery Case

• Journalists in Thailand are facing lawsuits for reporting on a government minister’s bribery case.

• Context:

  • The Minister of Natural Resources and Environment sued Hathairat Phaholtap, editor in chief of the Isaan Record, over Facebook posts citing the publication’s report that Thai politicians were involved in trafficking Thai berry pickers.

  • The report also claimed that politicians accepted bribes from brokers supplying Thai workers to a Finnish berry company.

  • The Minister then filed a separate claim against Kowit Phothisan, another editor at the Isaan Record, for sharing the posts.

» Kazakhstan Court Convicts 19 Anti-China Protestors

• A court in Kazakhstan has convicted all 19 defendants in a case linked to a protest demanding the release of a naturalized Kazakh citizen who has been detained in Xinjiang, China, since July 2025.

• Details:

  • The protest took place in November of last year near the border between the two countries.

  • In videos of the protest, defendants can be seen burning small Chinese flags and a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping, while chanting slogans against the President, the Chinese Communist Party, and calling for the release of the Kazakh citizen.

  • The court found the group guilty of “inciting interethnic hatred.”

  • Several received five-year prison sentences, while others were placed under state supervision, with limits on movement, residence, and daily activities.

  • All 19 are banned from engaging in political activity for three years.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Abigail Pope is a communications intern at The Future of Free Speech and a student at Vanderbilt University studying economics.

J.D. Vance criticized European democracies for censorship — but praised Viktor Orbán for sharing American values, including on free speech. Many on the right agreed.

But did Orbán actually support free speech, or were his critics right? Here is the record, year by year.

2010–11: Packing the Media Council

After winning a supermajority, Orbán packed the Media Council with Fidesz loyalists who could fine outlets for vague “content violations,” deny licenses, and steer state advertising to friendly media. More than 1,600 journalists were purged from public broadcasting. From Human Rights Watch:

After Fidesz won the 2010 elections, the government started to seize control of the media. It used its two-thirds majority in parliament to overhaul the media law, and packed the Media Authority, the media regulator, and its and Media Council with Fidesz loyalists. The government fired over 1,600 journalists and media workers at the public service broadcaster (MTVA), replacing them with government talking heads, effectively turning MTVA into a government-controlled broadcaster. Current and former MTVA employees told Human Rights Watch that reporters are told by their editors what and how to report, and which terms to use and to avoid, and if they do not like it, that they can pack and leave.

October 2016: Népszabadság Shut Down Overnight

Hungary’s largest opposition daily, Népszabadság, was closed overnight, days after publishing corruption stories about Orbán associates, suggesting political pressure. Fidesz’s vice president said, “It was about time.” The New York Times reported:

But on Saturday, [Investigative reporter Roland] Baska found that he could access neither his work email nor the newspaper’s website, including its archives. Mediaworks, the parent company, had replaced the website of the newspaper, Nepszabadsag, with an announcement that it was suspending publication immediately, because of steep circulation losses over the last decade.

Mr. Baksa and many of his roughly 50 colleagues, whose jobs are now in limbo, suspect another motivation: interference from the government of Hungary’s populist, right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, which has reined in government-run media and appears to be wielding increasing influence over privately run news companies as well.

In the newspaper’s final week, it reported that the head of Mr. Orban’s cabinet office had flown to a celebrity wedding by helicopter — an exorbitant expense that he had initially denied. The same week, Mr. Baksa revealed that the governor of the central bank was living in a luxury apartment owned by the president of the Hungarian Banking Association. Earlier, he had reported on the governor’s romance with a young woman who was consequently hired by the central bank for a record salary.

The paper was ultimately acquired by an Orbán-linked businessman.

April 2017: Lex CEU

A law written to target exactly one institution — the Central European University — gave the government sole discretion over agreements CEU needed to operate. CEU was forced to move to Vienna. The EU Court of Justice ruled the law illegal — too late, according to the BBC:

Europe’s top court has ruled that Hungary broke EU law when education rules forced a university in Budapest to shift most activity abroad.

The 2017 law focused on foreign universities but singled out the Central European University (CEU) founded by George Soros.

The European Court of Justice said that conditions imposed by Viktor Orban’s government were incompatible with EU law.

Only a skeleton CEU staff remains.

The central Budapest campus is now largely empty, after the law forced the university to move more than 90% of its teaching to a brand new campus in Vienna at a cost of €200m (£180m).

2018: KESMA — 500 Outlets, One Holding

Roughly 500 media outlets — TV, radio, newspapers, news websites — were simultaneously “donated” into a single government-aligned holding called KESMA. Orbán personally exempted it from competition law as a “national strategic interest.” By 2019, an estimated 80% of Hungarian media was under Fidesz control.

KESMA was soon to become the centralized media hub for media aligned with Fidesz, the party of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. It would provide a vessel for the government to exercise indirect control over much of Hungary’s private media landscape.

[ . . . ]

In December of 2018, the Orbán government decreed the formation of the KESMA conglomerate a matter of “strategic national importance”, thereby enabling KESMA to evade an investigation by the competition authority over antitrust rules.

By then, an investigation by a Hungarian news outlet estimated that KESMA controlled close to 500 media outlets.

March 2020: The Pandemic “Fake News” Law

Orbán’s emergency pandemic law — passed with no sunset clause — criminalized spreading “fake” or “distorted” facts about COVID, with up to five years in prison.

On Wednesday a member of the Momentum opposition party was detained in southern Hungary, over a social media post about a controversial government policy of clearing non-virus patients out of hospitals to make beds available for COVID-19 sufferers.

János Csóka-Szűcs shared a post from opposition MP Ákos Hadházy, adding that 1,170 hospital beds in his town of Gyula were being cleared -- a claim that has been confirmed to be true.

He was detained for four hours on the grounds that he had allegedly “obstructed efforts to combat the pandemic”.

“The silencing of critical voices has begun, namely by police action intimidating people who are writing or telling the truth,” Hadházy commented in a Facebook message.

The previous day a 64-year-old man was held for hours in northeastern Hungary over a message posted last month, criticising the government's lockdown policy. It included the remark: "You are a merciless tyrant, but remember, until now dictators always fall". Prosecutors said on Wednesday that the case had been closed.

Within weeks, more than 100 investigations were opened. Two people were detained for Facebook posts criticizing Orbán’s pandemic response:

In March, the government amended the criminal code to make it a crime to spread “fake news” or engage in “fear mongering” during a pandemic punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment. At the time, Harlem Desir, then media freedom representative for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), called on the government to ensure that the Authorization Act should not impede the work of media in Hungary. By July, police had launched 134 criminal investigations concerning “fear mongering.” A majority of cases concern people who expressed critical comments on social media regarding the government’s handling of the pandemic. At time of writing, investigations were ongoing.

July 2020: The Fall of Index.hu

The editor of Index.hu — Hungary’s largest independent news site — was fired after a pro-Orbán businessman seized its advertising arm. More than 70 journalists resigned in protest.

More than 70 journalists and staff at Hungary’s top news site Index have resigned, accusing the government of launching a bid to destroy or tame their website.

Index is the last of Hungary’s key independent media and editor in chief Szabolcs Dull was fired on Tuesday.

Its journalists said the sacking was “clear interference” and an attempt to apply pressure on the site.

Hours later protesters gathered in Budapest to rally for media freedom.

Over the past decade, supporters of nationalist and conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban have gradually taken control of Hungary’s independent media. Hungary is ranked 89th out of 180 countries on the Reporters without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

The same playbook had already turned Origo.hu into a government mouthpiece.

February 2021: Klubrádió Silenced

Hungary’s Media Council revoked the license of Klubrádió, the last major independent radio station, citing minor administrative violations rarely sanctioned.

In February 2026, the EU Court of Justice ruled the revocation illegal, finding Hungary had discriminated against a critical outlet.

June 2021: The “Gay Propaganda” Law

Parliament passed an act banning any portrayal or “promotion” of homosexuality and gender transition in schools, advertising, media, or books accessible to minors — mirroring Russia’s repressive “gay propaganda” law. The Venice Commission, the EU Commission, and 17 EU leaders condemned it.

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2019–2021: Pegasus Spyware Against Journalists

Hungary is the only EU member state confirmed to have used Pegasus, a military-grade spyware, against its own journalists. At least five reporters were hacked, confirmed by Amnesty International forensic analysis — including Szabolcs Panyi of Direkt36. From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

Szabolcs Panyi was not even remotely surprised when Amnesty International’s tech team confirmed in 2021 that his cell phone had been infiltrated by Pegasus spyware for much of 2019. Panyi, a journalist covering national security, high-level diplomacy, and corruption for Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, had already long factored into his everyday work that his communications with sources could be spied on. “I was feeling a mix of indignation, humiliation, pride and relief,” he told CPJ of his response to the Amnesty news.

Panyi appeared on surveillance lists alongside convicted criminals.

December 2023: The Sovereignty Protection Office

The Sovereignty Protection Act created a government office with investigatory powers over NGOs and media outlets deemed to have “foreign influence” — with no judicial oversight. From the Journal of Democracy:

[At] a U.S. Chamber of Commerce dinner in Budapest, U.S. ambassador to Hungary David Pressman rose to speak. His audience may have expected a diplomat’s remarks, full of platitudes. But instead Pressman spoke plainly, scolding Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán for “embracing Putin,” and criticizing the Hungarian government in a strikingly undiplomatic manner.

Hungary’s new “Sovereignty Protection Act” was the spark for the ambassador’s ire. In December, Orbán’s government passed this new piece of legislation, with the purported aim of fighting foreign influence on Hungarian politics. The legislation will create a new governmental entity, the Sovereignty Protection Office, and grant that agency unlimited investigatory powers to produce reports on foreign interference that are not subject to judicial review. The new office promises to serve as Orbán’s newest tool to crush dissent under his increasingly repressive regime.

Transparency International Hungary and anti-corruption outlet Átlátszó were targeted.

March–April 2025: The Pride Ban

Parliament fast-tracked a law banning Pride events in a single day, building directly on the 2021 propaganda law. Attending became a legal offense. Police were authorized to use facial recognition. Within weeks, the ban was enshrined in the constitution with a 140–21 vote.

May 2025: The Foreign Agent Law

Fidesz tabled a bill modeled on Russia’s foreign agent law that would allow the Sovereignty Protection Office to blacklist NGOs and media outlets receiving foreign funding — including EU grants. Those blacklisted face asset declarations, loss of tax donations, and risk of closure.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party introduced the bill on Tuesday in Parliament on the heels of Orbán’s pledge to crack down on a “shadow army” of critical voices, including journalists and activists, in a “spring cleaning.”

“The introduction of this Russian-style ‘foreign agent’ bill is a chilling signal that Orbán’s government is prepared to eliminate the last remnants of Hungary’s independent media in its pursuit of unchecked power ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections,” said Tom Gibson, CPJ’s deputy advocacy director, EU. “This measure amounts to Hungary’s complete abandonment of its responsibilities as a member of the European Union and would fundamentally undermine democracy. European leaders must act swiftly.”

The bill would grant Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office more power to establish “a register of organizations that threaten Hungary’s sovereignty with foreign aid,” according to an analysis by Médiafórum, the Association of Independent Media Outlets.

Listed organizations would face severe restrictions, including: mandatory public asset declarations from senior officers, founders, and oversight committee members; a requirement to obtain anti-money laundering approval for foreign funding; loss of eligibility for 1% tax donations from citizens; classification of leaders as “politically exposed persons”; and a mandate to secure proof from all donors that funds did not originate abroad.

The bill classifies any funding from outside Hungary as a potential sovereignty threat, including EU grants or donations as low as €5.

August 2025: Budapest’s Mayor Questioned

When Budapest’s mayor defied the ban and allowed the Pride parade, he was questioned by police. By December 2025, the police had recommended pressing criminal charges against him, which could carry up to one year in prison.

March 2026: Espionage Charges Against a Journalist

Weeks before Hungary’s election, Orbán’s government filed formal espionage charges against Szabolcs Panyi of Direkt36. A conviction could mean up to 15 years in prison.

Panyi had reported on Russian influence in Hungary and was the same journalist who had previously been hacked with Pegasus spyware.

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So, Why Single Out Hungary?

Some might ask: why focus on Hungary when France, Germany, the UK, and the EU also restrict speech?

Two responses. First: read my articles. Second: Hungary went further than any other EU state — which says a lot — in its efforts to silence dissent and opposition.

The Bottom Line

Being in favor of stronger national sovereignty, against EU membership, and in favor of traditional values is a perfectly valid political position. But those who want to advance such policies should not pretend that in pursuing these ends, Orbán was a champion of free speech and open democracy.

Americans who rightly hail the First Amendment and point to arrests in the UK and Germany as vindication of US free speech exceptionalism should not be taken seriously if they simultaneously insist that Orbán was fighting for freedom.

Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media and The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (with Jeff Kosseff).

Content moderation has become one of the central governance questions of the digital age. Decisions about whether to remove online speech determine the contours of public discourse. Despite growing regulatory intervention, particularly in the European Union, dissatisfaction with the current model persists.

Concerns about the over-removal of lawful speech, a lack of contextual sensitivity, and the concentration of power in private platforms remain unresolved. The challenge is not how to moderate content effectively, but how to do so in a way that is legitimate, proportionate, and compatible with freedom of expression.

In partnership with Analysis & Numbers, The Future of Free Speech has launched a new distributed content-moderation prototype that offers a concrete alternative. Rather than reinforcing centralized moderation, it redistributes decision-making power to users and communities.

The key rationale for the prototype’s development is that such distributed moderation models directly address structural flaws in both platform governance and regulatory approaches and may represent a necessary evolution in content moderation design.

The Structural Limits of Centralized Moderation

Content moderation has been defined as the process by which platforms screen, evaluate, categorize, approve, or remove user-generated content in accordance with relevant policies. Centralized moderation operates through standardization. Platforms apply uniform rules across diverse contexts, often relying on automated systems to manage scale. This produces efficiency but at the cost of nuance.

Moderation decisions are shaped not only by legal requirements but by platform incentives, risk management strategies, and internal governance structures. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) represents the most comprehensive attempt to regulate content moderation. It imposes obligations on platforms to remove illegal content, implement notice-and-action mechanisms, and ensure transparency and accountability.

However, the DSA operates within, and arguably reinforces, the centralized model it seeks to regulate. It assumes identifiable intermediaries capable of exercising control over content and enforcing rules across their systems. This creates a regulatory paradox. While the DSA aims to protect fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, it simultaneously incentivizes platforms to adopt more restrictive moderation practices.

One consequence of this regulatory framework is systematic over-removal. Platforms are incentivized to err on the side of caution, particularly where regulatory or reputational risks are high. In a 2024 study, we found that a substantial majority (87.5% to 99.7%) of deleted comments on Facebook and YouTube in France, Germany, and Sweden were legally permissible, suggesting that platforms, pages, or channels may be over-removing content to avoid regulatory penalties. This could reflect how regulatory pressure can exacerbate this tendency, encouraging platforms to remove lawful but controversial content in order to avoid liability or public backlash.

Automation intensifies this dynamic. AI-based moderation systems, while necessary at scale, struggle with context, irony, and cultural nuance. Empirical research has shown that such systems can produce both false positives (over-removal) and false negatives (under-enforcement), raising concerns about both accuracy and fairness. The result is a system in which speech is filtered not only by law but also by platform risk calculations embedded in algorithmic design.

Moreover, regulation struggles to keep pace with technological change. Emerging environments such as metaverses challenge the assumption that content can be centrally controlled and removed.

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Decentralization and the Crisis of Control

The rise of decentralized technologies introduces a fundamental shift in the structure of online systems. In decentralized networks, data is distributed across multiple nodes, with no single entity exercising full control. This has significant implications for content moderation.

Traditional models rely on central intermediaries to detect, evaluate, and remove content. In decentralized systems, these functions become fragmented or absent. Decentralization can enhance privacy, security, and resistance to censorship. At the same time, it creates new challenges for governance. Without central control, enforcing rules becomes difficult, and harmful content may persist.

Against this backdrop, distributed moderation offers a different paradigm. Rather than concentrating power in platforms or relying solely on regulation, it redistributes decision-making to users and communities.

The prototype provides a practical example of this approach, integrating AI classification with user-defined moderation thresholds, enabling context-sensitive decision-making. The system operates through a structured pipeline: comments are collected via platform APIs, analyzed by machine-learning models, stored in a database, and presented to moderators via a prioritized interface. Moderators can then take actions such as hiding, deleting, or blocking content.

Crucially, the system does not automate final decisions. AI is used to assist, not replace, human judgment. This hybrid model addresses the limitations of both purely automated and purely manual moderation. Normatively, the system embodies a shift from standardization to pluralism. Different communities can adopt different thresholds for what constitutes harmful content, reflecting their specific contexts and values.

The Pros and Cons

Distributed moderation directly addresses the structural problems of centralization. First, it reduces over-removal by allowing communities to calibrate their own thresholds. This counters the precautionary bias inherent in centralized systems and aligns moderation more closely with legal standards of permissible speech.

Second, it enhances contextual sensitivity. Community moderators are better positioned to understand the nuances of language, culture, and interaction within their spaces. This improves both accuracy and legitimacy.

Third, it restores user agency. As noted in research on decentralized governance, empowering users can “democratize the process” of content regulation and reduce reliance on opaque platform decisions. These features are particularly important given concerns about the concentration of power in digital platforms. By redistributing moderation authority, distributed systems can mitigate the risks associated with centralized control. At the same time, the model avoids the pitfalls of full decentralization. By retaining a structured interface, AI support, and integration with existing platforms, it ensures that moderation remains feasible and effective.

However, distributed moderation is not a panacea. It introduces new challenges, particularly regarding consistency, accountability, and potential fragmentation. Different communities may adopt divergent standards, raising questions about equality and fairness. There is also a risk that some communities may tolerate harmful content, particularly in the absence of strong oversight.

Moreover, empowering users requires capacity. Effective moderation depends not only on tools but on training, resources, and institutional support. Without these, distributed systems may struggle to achieve their full potential.

There are also legal questions. Existing regulatory frameworks are designed for centralized actors, and adapting them to distributed models will require careful consideration. Nevertheless, these challenges are not unique to distributed systems. They reflect broader tensions in content moderation between centralization and pluralism, efficiency and legitimacy, safety and freedom.

Can Decentralization Be The Future?

The current model of content moderation is reaching its limits. Centralized systems struggle with context, scale, and legitimacy, while regulatory frameworks risk reinforcing the very dynamics they seek to correct. Distributed moderation offers a promising alternative that could rebalance the relationship between platforms, users, and regulators.

The prototype discussed in this article demonstrates that such models are not merely theoretical. They can be built, tested, and deployed. The question is not whether distributed moderation will replace centralized systems entirely. It is whether it can complement and reshape them in ways that better align with democratic values and fundamental rights.

As online environments continue to evolve, particularly with the rise of decentralized technologies and immersive platforms, the need for such rethinking will only become more urgent.

Natalie Alkiviadou is a Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Free Speech. Her research interests lie in the freedom of expression, the far-right, hate speech, hate crime, and non-discrimination.

Luanne James has led a career in public service for over 25 years and has served as the Director of the Rutherford County Library System (RCLS) in Tennessee since July 2025. But when she refused to comply with a board decision she argued violated “the community’s right to information” and constituted “a direct infringement on the principles of free speech,” she was fired. Her colleagues championed her as a “patriot,” “inspiration,” and “hero” for standing firm.

James was protesting a March 16 majority vote by the RCLS board to move 132 children’s books into the adult sections of its libraries in Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and Eagleville. Board Chairman Cody York identified the majority of the titles for relocation, which he argued could promote gender confusion and violence in children.

This was York’s second attempt to limit books containing topics related to gender, sex, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ subjects. These include The Airless Year by Adam Knave, flagged for “female empowerment,” Jyoti Rajan Gopal’s Desert Queen, flagged for “strongly” promoting “gender equality, female empowerment, following one’s dreams, and challenging rigid social roles,” and David Levithan’s Answers in the Pages, for “classroom discussions of book bans and censorship.” In 2025, he led a vote to “remove material that promotes, encourages, advocates for or normalizes transgenderism or ‘gender confusion’ in minors,” and later asked the board to rescind due to legal challenges.

Since 2021, localized campaigns have targeted these types of books at the school library and classroom level. These efforts have put the number of book bans in the U.S. at an all-time high, with nearly 3,392 attempts to censor books between 2021 and 2024. In 2023, these numbers peaked, and challenges were brought against more than 9,000 titles.

Of books banned in two or more school districts, 39% contained LGBTQ+ characters, and 57% included sex-related themes or depictions, yet nearly 60% of these were written specifically for young adult audiences. While legitimate to restrict children from accessing books that contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts or pornographic images, the directive from the RCLS board targets a far broader category of works that do not contain this content, including books that promote disfavored ideas. Now, challenges to these books have only escalated, driven by organized advocacy groups, a growing patchwork of state laws, and public officials like York — and the focus has shifted from classroom shelves to public libraries.

In 2025, 55% of challenges to books were directed towards public libraries. As titles on these topics have already disappeared from several schools, any restriction on those ideas in public libraries threatens to further limit their availability outside the school.

James’ story is just one of several examples of librarians and school teachers around the country who have faced aggressive backlash and professional consequences for resisting these attempts. Yet, there are strong legal precedents indicating that the RCLS boards’ directive may have been unconstitutional. Empirical evidence also shows that increasing restrictions on children’s books carries serious risks for young individuals’ cognitive development and psychological well-being.

Librarians as Defenders of Intellectual Freedom

Depriving people of ideas deprives them of their ability to recognize injustice, critique the status quo, and enforce accountability. These abilities are critical to democracies, and largely contingent on a free marketplace of ideas that contains even those concepts that authorities might deem threatening, dangerous, or provocative.

Yet, in the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, during a crusade against the spread of communist ideas known as “The Red Scare,” panic took priority over liberty. Similar to the movement against library books today, organizations and committees branded themselves as patriotic and pressured libraries to expunge materials deemed radical or inflammatory from their collections. Eventually, the American people pushed back, and in the process, squarely placed librarians as essential defenders of intellectual freedom.

In 1948, the American Library Association amended its Library Bill of Rights to explicitly call on libraries to resist censorship “in maintenance of their responsibility to provide public information and enlightenment.” Librarians, as guardians of the venues in which people exercise their rights to free inquiry, have an obligation to ensure their facilities embody the diversity of thought that that freedom intrinsically requires.

History has often situated librarians as one of the first lines of defense for this freedom, a duty that James sought to fulfill. Retaliating against them for doing so will have consequences far beyond a single library and could shake one of the most important pillars of democracy. This is why courts have continued to treat libraries as distinguished warehouses of knowledge, where the removal or restriction of books must be carefully considered to avoid infringing on these freedoms.

Libraries and Legal Precedent

In Island Trees Sch. Dist. v. Pico by Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that public school boards cannot remove books from their junior high and high school libraries simply because they disagree with the ideas in them. This would violate students’ First Amendment right to receive ideas, “a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.” Removing books because of their content is a viewpoint-based restriction on ideas that students are entitled to hear.

This principle has also been applied in cases involving public libraries. In Sund v. City of Wichita Falls, Texas (2000), a federal court ruled that moving books from the children’s sections of a library to adult sections because of distaste for their content imposes an unconstitutional burden on patrons’ right to receive information.

If a legal challenge to the RCLS board’s relocation directive were brought, it’s likely that a court would raise similar constitutional issues, given that it was explicitly aimed at children’s books containing themes related to gender, sex, and sexuality. Add to that the fact that York expressly opposed books that suggest “boys aren’t really boys” or “girls aren’t really girls” — a specific idea that would constitute a viewpoint-based restriction. Enforcing restrictions on children’s books with the intent to limit minors’ access to a particular ideology has consistently been found incompatible with the First Amendment.

However, in Little v. Llano County (2025), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals suggested that the state can exercise some discretion in public libraries, ruling that the curation of book collections constitutes a form of government speech. This would mean that the viewpoint discrimination that the Supreme Court determined violated students’ First Amendment rights in Pico would be permissible in public libraries, even if it has the same consequences for patrons’ rights.

But this creates a split with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined in GLBT Youth in Iowa Schools Task Force v. Reynolds (2024) that the placement and removal of books could not be considered government speech in public school libraries because the public would not interpret it as such.

The most compelling argument against the ruling in Llano, however, comes from the dissenting opinion itself. “The logic of the Supreme Court’s school library decision in Pico— that the government may not remove library books with the purpose of denying access to disfavored ideas,” Judge Higginson wrote, “applies with even greater force to public libraries, where the government has no inculcating role over its sovereign, the people.”

While the government has a role in public schools to adhere to educational standards and teach certain values, which could warrant removing or replacing books, it has no such role in public libraries. There is even less reason, then, to deny access to books in these settings. In fact, Higginson added, the dissenting justices in Pico even justified restrictions on books in school libraries, because “the books would remain available in public libraries.” This suggests that the right to receive ideas should have even stronger protections in public libraries than in school libraries.

Restricting children’s access to books solely to deny them access to the ideas in them infringes on their First Amendment right to receive information that the Supreme Court has consistently recognized. History suggests it was James’ duty to protect these rights for the patrons of Rutherford County’s libraries, and firing her for doing so sends a discouraging message to librarians who may confront the same crossroads.

At a time when free inquiry is under siege, and books are collateral damage in partisan conflict, it is more important than ever that librarians are empowered to defend these freedoms. Further research shows that when children’s access to books intended for their learning and growth is restricted, it presents serious risks to their cognitive development and mental well-being.

Educational and Psychological Harms

Research in educational psychology supports a link between access to diverse literature and the development of empathy among children. A 2019 study published in the National Library of Medicine synthesized child development psychology and literary theory to identify the pathways in which children’s books promote cognitive empathy. The findings indicate that the stories that advance empathy depend on challenging children to “understand the perspective of protagonists who are unlike them.”

The part of literature most critical in advancing children’s reasoning skills, which allows them to assess others’ intentions, perceptions, desires, and mental states, is the part that exposes them to unfamiliar points of view. Restricting children’s books out of fear that the ideas in them may somehow corrupt their young readers deprives them of diverse characters and stories that could significantly benefit their cognitive empathy and reasoning skills. Promoting tolerance, overcoming bias, and participating in civic life hinge on these abilities and strengths, which raises the question: Do we want to diminish any opportunity for the next generation of leaders to build these skills?

Banning or restricting books often backfires, drawing more attention and publicity to the subjects they discuss. During “The Red Scare,” the New York City Board of Education enforced a ban on Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine, a book that had attracted controversy over its “Communist” themes. The ban triggered increased public interest, driving readership among high schoolers and sales for Fast.

Books banned in 2021 and 2022 saw an average 12% increase in circulation after the ban, while bans in one state correlated with increased readership in states of different political leanings where the book remained unrestricted.

Instead of restricting books in public libraries, decisions about children’s access to materials should be made primarily by the household. Parents can monitor children’s reading and place their own controls, without setting those boundaries for an entire community, which carries serious legal, psychological, and ethical implications.

What’s at stake isn’t any single book or library, but the bedrock freedoms of a democracy and children’s rights to learn freely. Every restriction on a book threatens to take the stories, perspectives, and people in them out of young Americans’ hands.

If a librarian can be fired for standing against such attacks on ideas, we risk a future where the next generation of leaders are disenfranchised of their right to be wholly informed — the foundation of a democratic citizenry.

Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

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This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇸 Trump Threatens to Jail Journalists Over Iran Fighter Jet Leak

— 🇮🇪 Ireland Tests Digital Wallet for Social Media Age Verification

— 🇬🇷 Greece to Block Social Media for Minors Under 15

— 🇫🇷 French MEP Detained Over “Apology for Terrorism” Charges

— 🇭🇺 Hungary Files Espionage Charges Against Investigative Journalist

First of All 🇺🇸

» Trump Threatens to Jail Journalists Over Iran Fighter Jet Leak

• President Trump has threatened to imprison journalists who reported details about a missing airman following the downing of a U.S. fighter jet by Iran.

• Details:

  • Trump said that he would pursue whoever leaked information about the second airman, and said, “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”

  • The pilot of the aircraft was recovered within several hours, while the “back seater” was stranded in Iranian territory until April 5, when he was recovered by American forces.

  • The President said the government had hoped to keep the second airman’s status a secret to prevent him from being captured or killed in Iran.

» University of Alabama Closes Student Magazines, Prompting Free Speech Lawsuit

• The University of Alabama has shuttered two student-run magazines for discrimination. This prompted a lawsuit alleging the university violated students’ First Amendment rights by silencing independent student media.

• Details:

  • On December 1, the university immediately suspended Alice, a women’s lifestyle magazine, and Nineteen Fifty-Six, a magazine named for the year Autherine Lucy became the first Black student to enroll at UA.

  • University officials argued the magazines were “unlawful proxies” for discrimination on the basis of race or gender, discriminating against groups that do not belong to the magazines’ respective target audiences, Black and female students.

  • The Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the ACLU of Alabama have filed a federal lawsuit against the magazines’ suspension.

  • The case comes amid a memo from former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, which outlined “best practices” for institutions receiving federal funding to avoid the “significant legal risks” of engaging in programs that may discriminate.

  • Gabrielle Gunter, the editor-in-chief of Alice, said, “Every single magazine has a target audience. The problem with Nineteen Fifty-Six and Alice is that our target audiences are groups this presidential administration doesn’t like.”

» Missouri Senate Passes Anti-SLAPP Bill to Shield Free Speech

• The Missouri Senate has passed a bill aimed at combating strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), joining a growing number of states with anti-SLAPP protections.

• Details:

  • The legislation would replace Missouri’s current Anti-SLAPP laws with the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, and allow defendants to seek early dismissal of cases against speech or journalism tied to matters of public concern.

  • The motion to dismiss would pause discovery and other proceedings while a court reviews the order, and allow a defendant to recover damages if the motion is approved.

  • The bill now heads to the Missouri House for consideration.

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The Digital Age 🤖

» White House Requests Satellite Imagery Providers to Indefinitely Withhold Images

• Planet Labs, a satellite imaging firm, told customers that it would indefinitely withhold imagery of Iran and the conflict region in the Middle East to comply with a request from the U.S. government.

• Details:

  • The decision comes after the company imposed a 14-day delay on imagery of the Middle East, which it said was to prevent adversaries from using images to attack the U.S. and its allies.

  • It said it will withhold imagery dating back to March 9, and that the policy will likely remain in effect until the end of the conflict.

  • While satellite technology is used for military purposes, including target identification, weapon guidance, missile tracking, and more, it also helps journalists and academicians study hard-to-reach places.

  • Planet Labs said it will release imagery on a case-by-case basis for urgent, mission-critical requirements or for public interest.

» Arizona Considers Requiring Parental Consent for Minors’ Social Media Use

• Arizona lawmakers are considering banning social media for children under 16 without parental permission.

• Details:

  • The latest versions of House Bill 2991 and Senate Bill 1747 require app stores to “determine or estimate” the age of new and existing users, and prevent users under 16 from downloading or accessing pre-downloaded apps without parental consent.

  • App developers would be expected to rely on app stores’ age findings and comply with the minimums.

  • Developers would also have to provide safeguards and parental controls for accounts held by minors, which could include daily time limits and restrictions on the sharing of users’ geolocation data.

  • Companies that violate the rules could face civil lawsuits from minors or their families for “actual damages,” or $1,000 per violation, whichever is greater.

  • If the violation was “egregious,” companies could face punitive damages, and the attorney general could seek a civil penalty of up to $75,000 per violation.

» Greece to Block Social Media for Minors Under 15

• Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said the country is expected to ban social media for children under 15.

• Details:

  • Although the legislation has not yet passed, it has little opposition and is expected to take effect in January 2027.

  • Mitsotakis said the government does not want to distance children from technology, which can be a source of inspiration and knowledge, but that “the addictive design of certain applications…has to be stopped at some point.”

  • Mitsotakis did not specifically name any of the social media companies that would be subject to the legislation, though officials later said the ban would apply to messaging apps.

  • Officials also added that the goal is to use Kids Wallet, a state-backed mobile app installed on children’s devices and linked to their parents’ accounts, to restrict access to social media.

  • Kids Wallet is already being used by parents to limit children’s screen time and restrict the purchase of age-restricted goods such as alcohol and tobacco.

» Ireland Tests Digital Wallet for Social Media Age Verification

• Ireland has begun testing a government-issued digital wallet that would verify users’ ages before granting access to social media platforms.

• Details:

  • The wallet must be implemented by the end of 2026 to comply with the European Union’s Online Safety Code, which requires platforms to implement effective age-verification measures.

  • According to the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalization, people can store digital copies of their birth certificates, driving licenses, health cards, and more in the digital wallet.

» Judge Dismisses X’s Antitrust Lawsuit Over Advertiser Boycott

• A judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against the World Federation of Advertisers and major brands, including Shell, Nestle, Colgate, and Mars, for allegedly colluding on an ad boycott on X, his social media platform.

• Background:

  • Advertisers had created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to moderate the content appearing around their ads, and had sent letters to Musk threatening collective action if he did not honor their brand safety standards.

  • Musk alleged that the advertiser-controlled initiative was conspiring to tank the app’s revenue and censor conservative viewpoints because he had cut the platform’s content moderation teams and disbanded its Trust and Safety Council.

  • U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle found that X failed to show that consumers were harmed, a required element for an antitrust claim, and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning X cannot refile.

  • Boyle also said that the advertisers “merely decided that they would not buy from X their own advertising need” out of concern for brand safety, and that they did not attempt to “control the social media advertising market” or work together.

  • The ruling could affect Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against Media Matters for America, whose reporting he says prompted the boycott.

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The Brussels Effect: Europe and Beyond 🇪🇺

» Hungary Files Espionage Charges Against Investigative Journalist

• The Hungarian government has filed criminal espionage charges against Szabolcs Panyi, a prominent investigative journalist, for alleged spying activities in coordination with a foreign country.

• Details:

  • Panyi was investigating Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s communications with Moscow when he was secretly recorded speaking to a source.

  • Media tied to Hungary’s government published the recording in edited form, and Panyi can be heard confirming the phone number that Szijjarto used.

  • The Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that Panyi has “spied against his own country in cooperation with a foreign state,” and that his role as a journalist was a cover.

  • Panyi, who had been targeted by military-grade spyware produced in Israel in 2021, denied sharing Szijjarto’s phone number with a foreign state and any wrongdoing.

  • In 2024, Panyi spoke at our Global Free Speech Summit and said that “[Hungary] is not in the business of trying to kill journalists. They are in the business of trying to kill stories by putting spyware on journalists’ phones so that they can identify our sources, and possibly they can intimidate our sources and prevent whistleblowers from contacting journalists.”

Our Take: “Charging journalists with espionage for investigating their own government is not the conduct of a liberal democracy,” The Future of Free Speech posted in a statement on social media expressing support for Szabolcs. “It is the conduct of the autocratic states that Panyi himself has spent his career documenting.”

» French Prosecutors Open Hate Speech Probe Against CNews Channel

• The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into French news channel CNews for alleged racist comments made about Bally Bagayoko, the newly elected Black mayor of the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis.

• Details: Bagayoko filed a complaint alleging that the comments made on the channel on March 27 and 28 constituted racial slurs, which are punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of up to €45,000 ($52,000).

» French MEP Rima Hassan Detained Over ‘Apology for Terrorism’ Charges

• French-Palestinian Member of European Parliament Rima Hassan has been detained by French authorities on charges of “apology for terrorism” in connection with social media posts that expressed solidarity with Kōzō Okamoto, a Japanese terrorist.

• Details:

  • Okamotio was responsible for the massacre of 26 passengers at Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel.

  • This is not the first time Hassan has been accused of condoning terrorism, as her statements about the Israel-Gaza conflict have repeatedly come under fire.

  • Though she said Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, was “morally unacceptable,” she has drawn criticism from several parties in France’s political establishment for continuing to describe Hamas’ armed resistance against Israel as “legitimate from the perspective of international law.”

  • Her post was brought to French prosecutors by Hassan’s fellow French lawmaker, Matthias Renault, who posted, “Finally, the beginning of the end of impunity for the France Unbowed lawmaker!”

  • Hassan is now being held for condoning terrorism, as well as drug use, transportation, and possession, after nearly 2 grams of synthetic drugs were discovered in the bag she had brought to fulfill her summons at a Paris police station.

» Spain Rules LaLiga Players’ Protest is Legal

• Spain’s National Court has ruled that players protesting the plans of LaLiga, a professional football league, were legally exercising “their right to freedom of expression.”

• Details:

  • The players did not play for the first 15 seconds of matches in games played over October 17-20, in protest of LaLiga’s proposal to move a scheduled match between Villarreal and Barcelona from Spain to Miami, Florida.

  • LaLiga sued, alleging the players’ protest was illegal, but the National Court found that the protest “did not constitute a strike” and was a protected expression.

  • The Spanish Footballers’ Association (AFE)— the players’ union— highlighted that the ruling was based on an article of the players’ collective bargaining agreement, which gives professional footballers the “right to freely express their thoughts on any matter and, in particular, on matters related to their profession, with no limitations other than those derived from the law and respect for others.”

Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Mass Arrests in the Middle East Amid Crackdown on Coverage of Conflict

• UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned of an escalating crackdown on coverage of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, highlighting the arrest of nearly 2,350 people in Iran since February 28.

• In Iran:

  • Those arrested face national security charges, including terrorism, dissent, alleged espionage, and ‘cooperation with the enemy.’”

  • The Commissioner added that many of these people face expedited proceedings and the risk of execution, with eight people already put to death.

• In the Gulf:

  • In Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, 313 and 109 people have been detained, respectively, “in relation to the filming or sharing of information, among other charges.”

  • 35 people in the UAE have been sent for “expedited trial,” among them individuals who circulated footage showing Iranian strikes.

  • At least 4 critics were reportedly arrested in Jordan.

  • In Kuwait, a new decree imposes prison terms and steep fines for circulating content that seeks to “undermine the prestige of the military” or public trust in it.

  • Public prosecutors in Bahrain have sought the death penalty for individuals accused of espionage.

• In the Occupied West Bank:

  • Israeli authorities announced the detention of 200 Palestinians between February 28 and March 6, including for posts made on social media, suspicion of “incitement,” and “glorification of the enemy.”

  • A 44-year-old Palestinian high school principal was physically assaulted by Israeli authorities, who also vandalized his home, for a post he reportedly published expressing support for Iran.

» IPI Report Shows Widening Crackdown on Independent Journalism in Sahel States

• A new report by the International Press Institute has documented intensifying threats to independent journalism following a series of military coups in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.

• Key Findings:

  • Military rulers across the Sahel have weaponized cybercrime laws to arrest and jail journalists, blocked or suspended dozens of local and foreign media outlets, and even forcibly conscripted critical reporters into military service in Burkina Faso.

  • Niger has emerged as the region’s leading jailer of journalists, with multiple reporters currently imprisoned under cybercrime charges for covering security-related topics, including refugee conditions and the activities of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner.

  • French media outlets, including Radio France Internationale (RFI), France 24, and LCI, have been suspended or banned in Mali and Burkina Faso.

  • Burkina Faso has also blocked the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, The Guardian, and Le Monde—many of which remain inaccessible.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Abigail Pope is a communications intern at The Future of Free Speech and a student at Vanderbilt University studying economics.

I recently gave a lecture on the limits of freedom of expression in Canada at York University in suburban Toronto. York is known for rowdy protesters shutting down guest speakers. It crossed my mind that I might attract a heated crowd who would confront me for my political opinions.

I’m pro-Israel, anti-DEI, and lean conservative, which could make me a target of the radical leftists on campus who like to pull firearms and shut down guest speakers. If they tried to interrupt, I’d let them say their piece and then give them a lesson on the heckler’s veto. I had no reason to worry. Only five students showed up. Five. Does anybody care about free speech in Canada anymore?

Canada has always been a liberal democracy with protections for free speech. But the global free speech recession has hit us hard, and most Canadians don’t seem to have realized it yet. Many Canadians don’t understand that so much of the progress we’ve made – from dropping race as a factor in immigration in 1962 to legalizing same-sex marriage in 2005 – happened because we were free to debate controversial ideas. That freedom is increasingly threatened.

Bill C-9 is the latest threat. Bill C-9 passed in the House of Commons on March 25 and is now working its way through Canada’s mostly rubber-stamp Senate. Senators can suggest changes, but by convention, can’t block them, so some version will likely become law.

Bill C-9 threatens free expression for two main reasons. First, it would remove an exemption to criminal hate speech convictions for good-faith religious arguments, meaning that reading Bible verses or Hadiths viewed as transphobic or homophobic could lead to prison. Street preachers are terrified. They should be. A non-criminal human rights tribunal recently ordered a former British Columbia school trustee to pay CAD-$750,000 to teachers because of his supposedly hateful and discriminatory speech on Facebook and in interviews.

C-9 also bans so-called hate symbols, including Nazi insignias and any flag or symbols of designated terror groups, which include everyone from the Taliban to the Proud Boys. It’s not yet clear whether wearing black-and-gold Fred Perry polos (a symbol associated with the Proud Boys) will now be considered a real crime in Canada rather than just a fashion crime. I joke, but in all seriousness, banning symbols is a content-based restriction that undermines a core principle of free speech.

C-9 is just the latest in a series of laws restricting free expression that Canada’s Liberal government has passed or proposed. A worse one may be on the way. This post aims to take stock of how Canada got here and where things might be headed if more Canadians don’t educate themselves about the value of freedom of speech.

Canada Led on Free Expression in The 20th Century

Canada was born in 1867, when a handful of fledgling provinces united into one nation with common defense and a common market to reduce the risk of being swallowed up by Uncle Sam. The United Kingdom granted us a constitution, to use the text of the Constitution Act, 1867, “similar in principle” to theirs. There was no flashy bill of rights.

Still, in the 20th Century, the Supreme Court of Canada repeatedly found that censorship was incompatible with Britain’s unwritten constitution and therefore our own.

In the 1938 Alberta Press Case, the Supreme Court recognized that “the right of public discussion” was so essential to democracy that it trumped an Alberta law that purported to allow the government to prohibit publication of newspaper articles.

In the 1950 Boucher decision, the Court overturned the seditious libel conviction of a Jehovah’s Witness who had distributed pamphlets entitled “Quebec’s Burning Hate for God and Christ and Freedom is the Shame of Canada.” There, Justice Ivan Rand channeled John Stuart Mill, writing that “our compact of free society absorbs the subjective incidents of controversy within the framework of freedom and order, because a process of free exchange … ultimately serves us in stimulation, in the clarification of thought and … the search for the constitution and the truth of things generally.”

In 1953, the Court again sided with free speech, deciding in Saumur to strike down a Quebec City bylaw forbidding distributing literature on city streets without the permission of the Chief of Police because it aimed to regulate “the minds of the users of the streets.”

And, in 1957, the Court protected speech again, in Switzman, striking down Quebec’s Act to Protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda, which had allowed the attorney general to padlock any property accused of hosting “communistic” meetings.

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Hate Speech Bans Upheld

Free speech faced a new threat in the 1960s. Canada’s academic left successfully lobbied Parliament to join the Soviet Union and Europe in criminalizing hate speech. In 1966, a group of law professors, including future Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who had written a glowing review of his trip to Maoist China a few years earlier and who later became close friends with Fidel Castro), released the Report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada. This report to Parliament, cited later on in the 1990 Keegstra case, said that words have the “power … to maim,” and concluded that “the privilege of speech” must “stop this side of injury to the community itself and to individual members or identifiable groups innocently caught in verbal cross-fire that goes beyond legitimate debate.”

This led in 1970 to Criminal Code prohibitions against advocating genocide, wilful promotion of hatred, and inciting hatred against an identifiable group where it was likely to lead to a breach of the peace. To reduce fears of speech chill, the provisions require something no other criminal law does: consent from provincial attorneys general before charges can be laid.

Trudeau served as prime minister from 1968 to 1984 with a brief interregnum. While his reign started with banning hate speech, it ended with the passage of a bill of rights for Canada: 1982’s Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter seemed promising for free speech. Section 2 states: “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association.” Section 1 says these freedoms are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The Supreme Court could now strike down laws on the basis that they violate freedom of speech, without needing to justify its actions on the vague requirements of the U.K.’s unwritten constitution.

Naturally, this led to a showdown at the Supreme Court over whether the 1970 hate speech laws could truly be justified in a free and democratic society. Canada put people in prison for words, after all.

Edmonton-area high school teacher James Keegstra – a vile anti-Semite who described Jews to his students as treacherous, subversive, sadistic, money-loving, power-hungry child killers – was the test case. Mr. Keegstra had been found guilty by an Alberta jury of the crime of wilful promotion of hatred.

In the 4-3 decision released in 1990, Chief Justice Brian Dickson and three other judges found the criminal hate speech provision to be a reasonable limit on the right to free expression. The Holocaust proved to Dickson that hate speech could cause enough pain, tension, and violence to justify restricting some people’s free speech rights. In Taylor, a similar case decided at the same time based on a provincial human rights code provision against promoting hatred, Dickson said that he was not concerned about the subjectivity of what counts as “hatred,” claiming it would be limited to “unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification.”

Beverley McLachlin, who succeeded Dickson as chief justice, and two others disagreed with Dickson that hate speech provisions can co-exist with free speech. McLachlin was concerned that the law did not require proof of any actual harm or incitement to violence before a person could be put behind bars, and thought that it was irrational to believe that criminalizing hateful speech would stop it, considering Weimar Germany’s failed hate speech laws.

McLachlin’s bigger concern was chill. “The combination of overbreadth and criminalization may well lead people desirous of avoiding even the slightest brush with the criminal law to protect themselves in the best way they can -- by confining their expression to non-controversial matters,” McLachlin wrote. “Novelists may steer clear of controversial characterizations of ethnic characteristics... Scientists may well think twice before researching and publishing results of research ... Given the serious consequences of criminal prosecution, it is not entirely speculative to suppose that even political debate on crucial issues such as immigration, educational language rights, foreign ownership and trade may be tempered,” she added. One needed to look no further than the confiscation of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which had been stopped by Canadian border officials applying a similarly-worded anti-hatred provision, she wrote.

Despite the 1982 Charter’s promise, Canada entered a more censorious era.

The Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant Affair

In early 2006, right-wing rabblerouser Ezra Levant of the populist Western Standard magazine published several of the famous Jyllands-Posten cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an unflattering light.

Later that year, Maclean’s magazine (Canada’s version of Newsweek) published a cover story by journalist Mark Steyn entitled The Future Belongs to Islam. Steyn theorized that liberal democracies with low birthrates and weak national identities would quickly be overwhelmed by a fast-growing Muslim demographic that was more interested in theocratic rule than democracy. Needless to say, it was a controversial thesis.

Steyn, Levant, and the publications they worked for were soon hit with a barrage of complaints by Muslims in human rights tribunals across the country, alleging discrimination and hate speech. One complaint against Steyn was filed with the federal Human Rights Commission under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Section 13 forbade repeated communications that would “expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

All of the complaints were eventually dismissed, but the attack on freedom of expression caused enough Canadians to recoil that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was in power from 2006 to 2015, eventually repealed section 13 of the CHRA. Only the criminal hate speech provisions remained federally, and provincial human rights tribunals were chastened by the censorship backlash.

The Justin Trudeau Era

In 2015, Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin was elected prime minister. While controlling speech was not on the agenda for most of Justin Trudeau’s first term, he began to lean into concerns around online misinformation ahead of the October 2019 election.

In May 2019, Trudeau announced he was planning a new “Digital Charter” that would create “meaningful financial consequences” for social media platforms that failed to “step up in a major way” to counter disinformation and hate speech. He said that platforms would be required to remove illegal content within 24 hours. Trudeau was re-elected and soon introduced three new speech-regulation bills.

The Online Streaming Act, passed in 2023, was ostensibly designed to ensure Canadians can see “Canadian stories” in an era when more people had turned to streaming on Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, by requiring that Canadian content be given preferred billing on those platforms (for example, by showcasing Canadian TV shows at the top of Netflix screens). It also gave the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission the power to require platforms to choose programs based on race or language. That doesn’t sound like a freedom of speech issue until you realize it means platforms must, by law, push more CBC and less Joe Rogan.

Bill C-18, the Online News Act, also became law in 2023. The ONA absurdly requires digital platforms over a certain size to pay Canadian news outlets whenever people post links to news websites. While Google complied, Meta opted instead to block links to news, vastly reducing Canadians’ access to traditional news. It’s common to open Instagram or Facebook and see the ominous message: “People in Canada can’t see this content. In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be viewed in Canada.” Ironically, it’s not illegal to post AI-generated slop that looks like real news but isn’t!

Worst of the trio, by far, was the Online Harms Bill. The first version, tabled in 2021, jolted free expression advocates. Bill C-36 would have brought back a version of section 13 that Prime Minister Harper had removed, with much higher potential penalties. Anyone could have brought another person before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal as a result of seeing discriminatory speech online, with up to $20,000 in damages available to accusers and fines of up to $50,000. In some cases, the accusers could remain anonymous.

Unlike with criminal hate speech provisions, the tribunal would only need to find that the speech is discriminatory on a balance of probabilities. C-36 would also have created a pre-crime provision that would allow judges presented with “reasonable grounds” that a person might commit “an offence motivated by bias, prejudice or hate” in the future to jail them for up to 12 months. C-36 died when Parliament was dissolved for a surprise election in autumn 2021, which Trudeau won.

In 2024, Trudeau brought the Online Harms Bill back; this time, it was even worse. Bill C-63 would have included the $50,000 fines for online speech and the pre-crime provision. It would have also allowed up to life in prison for hate-motivated crimes. Plus, it would have created a new Digital Safety Commissioner watchdog. And it would have created new obligations on social media platforms to police speech through a new “duty to act responsibly” by taking down “harmful content,” including “content that foments hatred,” with fines in the millions. The same platforms that opted to block all news links rather than pay newspapers could not be expected to err on the side of protecting free speech if millions of dollars were on the line.

C-63 was opposed vociferously by Conservative opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and civil society groups like the Canadian Constitution Foundation, where I work. The Conservatives managed to slow the bill down and prevent its passage. For most of 2024, it looked like Poilievre would take power in the 2025 election. But, last April, Canadians chose the new Liberal leader, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, as prime minister instead.

Will Mark Carney Resist The Urge to Censor?

Carney’s Liberal platform promised to bring back the Online Harms Act. The platform stated that the Liberals would “introduce legislation within its first 100 days to combat serious forms of harmful online content, specifically hate speech, terrorist content, content that incites violence, child sexual abuse material and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.” They also promised to “make sure that social media platforms and other online services are held accountable for the content that they host,” and to “strengthen the Canada Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to more effectively combat online hate.” The first 100 days came and went.

Last September, Carney’s minister tabled Bill C-9, which would ban certain symbols such as terrorist flags. This was mostly in response to police frustrations that they could not criminally charge people waving terrorist flags at pro-Palestinian marches after October 7.

But there was a problem: Carney was a few seats shy of a majority in Parliament, so he needed a single vote from a Bloc Québécois member to get his bill through the Parliamentary committee. The Bloc – a highly secularist, anti-immigrant, Quebec separatist party – named its price: removal of the good-faith religious defense that Muslim preachers sometimes used to avoid criminal hate speech. The Liberals agreed. (Thankfully, as a result of advocacy by the CCF and the Conservatives, C-9 no longer lowers the definition of hatred, and no longer removes the protective requirement for attorney general consent to charges, as the Liberals had originally proposed.)

We simply don’t know what’s coming next. The minister in charge has repeatedly said some version of the Online Harms Act will return, as promised. In March, Prime Minister Carney said so too, suggesting the bill will include a ban on social media for children. Does this mean Carney has abandoned the proposal for a hate speech tribunal, the Digital Safety Commissioner, the pre-crime provision, and the huge fines for platforms that allow “harmful” speech on their platforms in favor of age limits for kids to access social media? Or is the plan to use the popular proposal to put age limits on social media to ram through the whole thing?

What we do know is that Carney may have a majority in the House of Commons after three byelections on April 13. That would give him the votes to regulate speech without needing any opposition support. We can only hope Canadians see the risks of C-9 and tell him that enough is enough.

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Josh Dehaas is Interim Litigation Director with the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a legal charity dedicated to defending Canadians’ rights and freedoms. He is co-author of Free Speech in Canada: A beginner’s guide from ancient roots to current controversies.

This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇸 SCOTUS Rejects Colorado’s Conversion Therapy Ban

— 🇮🇩 Indonesia’s Social Media Ban Takes Effect

— 🇫🇮 Finnish MP Convicted for Hate Speech

— 🇹🇷 Censorship in India Spikes Amid Iran War

— 🇮🇱 Israeli Soldiers Assault and Detain CNN News Crew

First of All 🇺🇸

» Supreme Court Sides with Therapist in Challenge to Colorado’s Ban on Conversion Therapy

• The U.S. Supreme Court has, by an 8-1 vote, remanded Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors to lower courts, instructing it to apply strict scrutiny and stressing that it would likely fail on grounds of viewpoint discrimination.

• Details:

  • Licensed counselor Kaley Chiles went to federal court to challenge the 2019 law, arguing that she tries to help clients “with their stated desires and objectives in counseling,” which can include reducing unwanted sexual attractions or behaviors.

  • A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found that the ban regulated conduct that happened to involve speech and used the least stringent test for constitutional challenges, the “rational basis” test, allowing the state to continue enforcing the law.

  • Writing for the majority, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch stressed that the ban “censors speech based on viewpoint,” and that although it addresses conduct, it “regulates what [Chiles] may say” as well as “what views she may and may not express,” and stressed the high likelihood that it would fail the strict scrutiny.

» Federal Judge Rules Trump Violated Free Speech by Ordering NPR Defunded

• A federal judge has found that President Trump’s executive order barring federal funding for NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and is “unlawful and unenforceable.”

• Background:

  • The order singled out the two broadcasters and accused them of not presenting “fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” and revoked $1.1 billion in congressionally-approved public media funding.

  • Justice Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the order “singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs.”

  • “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch,” Moss added.

  • White House spokesperson called it “a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge,” and the Trump administration said it would appeal.

» Judge Blocks Pentagon’s Ban on Anthropic, Cites First Amendment Retaliation

• A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Pentagon from labeling AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and halted the Trump administration’s ban on federal use of its technology, citing likely First Amendment retaliation.

• Details:

  • The designation followed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s announcement that he would not allow the company’s AI model, Claude, to be used for autonomous weapons or citizen surveillance, as detailed in a previous Free Flow.

  • District Judge Rita Lin found that the government’s actions were likely motivated by retaliation for Anthropic’s public statements, which drew scrutiny to the government’s contracting position.

  • Lin stayed her order against the Department of Defense’s designation, which would have effectively barred the company from government contracts, for seven days, giving the government an opportunity to appeal.

  • “Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” the order said.

» Tennessee Library Board Fires Director for Refusing to Move LGBTQ Books

• The Rutherford County Library Board in Tennessee has voted 8-3 to fire library system director Luanne James for refusing to comply with its order to relocate more than 100 LGBTQ+ books from the children’s to the adult section.

• Context:

  • On March 16, the board voted to move the books, with Board Chairman Cody York arguing it is dangerous and inaccurate to tell children that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

  • Two days later, James emailed the board saying she would not move the books, arguing that doing so would violate her and county residents’ First Amendment rights and compromise her professional obligation to prevent government-mandated viewpoint discrimination.

  • “Librarians should not be used as a filter for political agendas,” James said in a statement read by her attorney after her firing, “I stood up for the right to read, standing for the citizens of Rutherford County.”

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The Digital Age 🤖

» Austria Plans Social Media Ban for Children Under 14

• Austria’s governing coalition has announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a growing list of countries imposing age-based restrictions on platform access.

• Details:

  • The proposal would prohibit children under 14 from accessing social media platforms, though specific enforcement mechanisms have not yet been detailed.

  • If enacted, Austria would join Australia, which implemented an under-16 ban late last year.

  • The announcement comes as Australia’s communications watchdog said this week that social media firms must better enforce the country’s under-16 ban, noting that one-fifth of Australian minors continue to use platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, as mentioned in a previous Free Flow.

» France Moves Closer to Social Media Ban for Children Under 15

• France’s Senate approved a proposal to restrict social media access for children under 15, advancing President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge amid broader European efforts to regulate minors’ online activity.

• Background:

  • France has long pushed stricter controls on youth access to social media, including a 2023 law requiring parental consent for minors under 15—though it never took effect due to conflicts with EU law.

  • The National Assembly’s earlier version of the bill mandates that platforms delete existing underage accounts and block new ones, and bans mobile phones in high schools.

  • The Senate’s version proposes a two-tier system distinguishing between harmful platforms (which would be banned) and others accessible with parental consent, while exempting educational services.

  • Ongoing EU-level debates over age verification systems—and broader Digital Services Act (DSA) constraints—have complicated national efforts to regulate access.

  • Lawmakers remain divided between the Assembly and Senate versions, requiring a compromise before implementation—likely delaying enforcement.

  • Key questions remain unresolved, particularly around how platforms will verify users’ ages without infringing privacy or creating new barriers to access.

» Indonesia’s Social Media Ban for Minors Takes Effect

• Indonesia’s ban on social media for children under 16 has officially taken effect, making it one of the latest countries to impose age-based restrictions on platform access.

• Details:

  • The ban, Regulation of the Minister of Communication and Digital No. 9 of 2026, 5, took effect on March 28, and requires social media platforms to block accounts belonging to users under 16.

  • Authorities have already summoned officials from Google and Meta over compliance failures with the new law.

  • TikTok and Roblox have also received warning letters that said they showed “partial compliance,” and the country’s minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said that “if they still fail to demonstrate full compliance,” they will be summoned as well.

  • The government has not specified what penalties under the law could be, but has previously stated they would include warnings, administrative fines, temporary suspension, and “termination of access” to the local market.

Our Take: In an X thread about Indonesia’s social media ban, Jacob Mchangama argues, “Just as proponents of free speech should take seriously the very real challenges that social media brings about for children, childrens’ advocates should acknowledge that their policy proposals have real consequences for free expression and that good intentions do not equal good outcomes.” To read more about the dangers of social media age restrictions, read Jacob and Jeff Kosseff in the Wall Street Journal.

» India Sees Spike in Social Media Censorship Amid Iran War

• Internet watchdogs documented a surge in takedowns of social media content critical of the Indian government’s response to the Iran conflict beginning on March 11, with at least 42 instances recorded by March 19.

• Background:

  • India’s legal framework allows authorities to issue takedown orders for national security or public order reasons, though these requests or the reasoning behind them are not made public.

  • Removed content included political cartoons, satire, opposition messaging, and commentary questioning New Delhi’s silence on U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran.

  • Affected voices ranged from cartoonists and journalists to opposition figures, parody accounts, and even a retired Air Force officer.

» Iran Cracks Down on Starlink Sellers as Internet Blackout Continues

• Iranian authorities have arrested dozens of people for alleged involvement in a network that sold Starlink satellite terminals, which have enabled people to access the internet and communicate during ongoing internet blackouts.

• Context:

  • The internet has been nearly completely blacked out in Iran for more than a month, following shutdowns during anti-government protests beginning in December, and throughout the ongoing conflict with the U.S. and Israel.

  • Iranians are attempting to circumvent the blocks, including by using Starlink satellite-internet terminals developed by SpaceX, despite the fact that such attempts could result in capital punishment.

  • Authorities have reportedly seized 139 Starlink devices and arrested 46 people accused of selling the terminals.

  • Information and Communications Technology Minister Sattar Hashemi signed a document escalating operations to locate Starlinks, citing public leaks of government files detailing its strategy to target resellers.

  • This comes as bombing, power outages, and overstretched emergency services are taking a toll on the nation’s infrastructure in addition to its censorship system.

  • Regime-approved communication, which the nation’s censorship systems were designed to protect, has also degraded, and local data centers and “white SIM cards,” as mentioned in a previous Free Flow, are no longer working.

» Brazil Proposes Targeting Online Misogyny as Senate Advances Criminalization Bill

• Brazil is proposing a new decree to combat misogyny online, while the Federal Senate advances legislation that would criminalize misogyny with prison sentences of up to five years.

• Background:

  • The decree, led by Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security, is part of the National Pact Brazil Against Femicide, responding to a reported rise in coordinated online harassment and misogynistic content.

  • At the same time, Brazil’s Federal Senate has approved a bill that would classify misogyny as a criminal offense, defined as conduct rooted in beliefs of male supremacy.

  • The bill would incorporate misogyny into existing laws governing prejudice and discrimination, akin to provisions in Brazil’s Law of Racism.

  • Lawmakers backing the bill point to rising violence against women, citing thousands of femicide cases and attempted femicides in 2025 alone.

• The Decree would:

  • Establish a heightened duty of care for platforms

  • Require rapid removal of illegal content, particularly non-consensual intimate material

  • Create reporting mechanisms for victims

  • Impose corporate liability for coordinated harassment campaigns

  • Ban AI-generated sexualized or manipulated content (e.g., deepfakes)

• The Senate Bill:

  • Criminalizes misogyny with 2–5 year prison sentences

  • Applies to online abuse, including threats and harassment directed at women

  • The Senate rejected proposed exemptions for speech framed as “free speech” or religious expression

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The Brussels Effect: Europe and Beyond 🇪🇺

» Finnish MP Convicted for Hate Speech

• Finland’s supreme court has, in a 3-2 vote, convicted Christian Democrat Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen of inciting hatred after she republished a pamphlet on social media claiming that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder.”

• Background:

  • Räsänen first published the pamphlet in 2004, and republished it on Facebook in 2019 and on her website in 2020.

  • Lower courts had acquitted her of all charges. The Supreme Court reversed those acquittals and fined her €1,800.

• Reaction:

  • Finnish government ministers from Räsänen’s party and the nationalist Finns Party immediately called for freedom of speech protections and legislative changes.

  • The minister of justice, Leena Meri, said the law was “not sufficiently precise and especially not predictable as required by the principle of legality in the criminal code,” and that, “It is very difficult for people to know what is prohibited and what is permitted.

  • Räsänen said she would consider appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.

Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Israeli Soldiers Assault and Detain CNN News Crew

• A CNN team reporting on the aftermath of an assault by Israeli settlers and the establishment of an illegal outpost near the Palestinian village of Tayasir was detained and physically assaulted by Israeli soldiers.

• Background:

  • The Foreign Press Association (FPA), representing hundreds of journalists in Israel and Palestine, condemned the attack and said the crew clearly identified themselves as press.

  • Israeli soldiers reportedly pointed rifles at the CNN crew and nearby civilians, ordered journalists to stop filming, and threatened to confiscate their equipment.

  • According to the FPA, a soldier placed CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos in a chokehold, slammed him to the ground, and damaged his camera.

  • CNN confirmed the account, while the FPA rejected the idea that the incident was a misunderstanding, calling it a direct attack on press freedom.

  • The IDF said the episode would be investigated, with a spokesperson stating the conduct did not reflect military standards and apologizing for the incident.

» China Tries Artist in Secret Trial Over Sculptures Mocking Mao

• A prominent Chinese artist, Gao Zhen, stood trial on Monday in a closed-door proceeding for allegedly “slandering” Mao Zedong through satirical sculptures. This trial highlights the Chinese government’s continued crackdown on artistic and historical expression.

• Background:

  • China criminalized speech that “tarnishes” official historical narratives in 2018, with expanded penalties in 2021 allowing prison sentences of up to three years.

  • Authorities have increasingly used these laws against journalists, comedians, and online commentators critical of the Communist Party’s version of history.

  • Gao Zhen’s work—created over a decade ago—includes irreverent depictions of Mao, addressing taboo subjects such as the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

  • Gao was tried in secret after more than 18 months in detention, with authorities barring public access and even denying entry to a U.S. diplomat.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Justin Hayes is the Director of Communications at The Future of Free Speech and the Managing Editor of The Bedrock Principle.

Australia’s greatest export is no longer coal or iron ore, but the censorship of political speech justified as the protection of children. Last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans to follow Australia’s lead in banning under-16s from social media to protect children from the “digital wild west.” Similar proposals have emerged from the EU, the UK, France, Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, and New Zealand.

While politicians, journalists, and intellectuals have widely celebrated the social media ban, Australia’s own experience shows how regulation that begins with children does not end with them — they are simply the entry point for broader systems of control.

The trajectory is already clear. The office of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the regulatory authority presiding over the social media ban, was originally established as a narrow, complaints-based body targeting the cyberbullying of children. It has since evolved into a far more powerful regulator with the ability to issue takedown notices for a range of content, including “adult cyber abuse” — a category that has repeatedly encompassed political speech.

The Commissioner has even sought to extend these powers further through an “informal alerts” system. Where the office lacks the statutory authority to compel removal, it contacts platforms directly, encouraging them to review content under their own policies, effectively applying pressure outside of the formal legal process.

This practice was recently tested in a case brought by a Sydney-based bisexual activist, Celine Baumgarten. In a post on X, Baumgarten criticized the creation of a queer club for children as young as 8 in a primary school, arguing that such children were too young to learn about sexuality and gender ideology. Although the post did not meet the threshold for formal takedown, the eSafety office escalated the matter through X’s high-priority legal challenge portal, resulting in the content being geo-blocked in Australia.

Baumgarten later lodged an action in the Administrative Review Tribunal. eSafety attempted to have the case thrown out, arguing that because the action was informal, it could not be legally challenged or reviewed by the Tribunal. The Tribunal rejected this argument, ultimately finding that eSafety could not claim to exercise legal power, achieve a coercive result, and then avoid judicial scrutiny by arguing it was acting outside its formal powers. This decision was later upheld by the Federal Court.

This expansion of eSafety’s powers did not happen by accident. During a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2024, Ms. Inman Grant explained that when former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced the original legislation, he “knew that we really had to start with children first, because you can’t really argue that children aren’t vulnerable.” In other words, children are not the endpoint of regulation, but the starting point.

The same logic may now be at work with the social media ban. It is no coincidence that the ban passed just days after the Albanese government abandoned its proposed misinformation and disinformation laws, legislation that would have forced digital platforms to “prevent and minimize” vaguely defined harms under the threat of massive financial penalties.

While the mechanism differs, the incentive remains the same. Platforms would have been driven to pre-emptively remove large swathes of legitimate public debate to avoid penalties. The same logic now applies to the social media ban, which encourages platforms to remove accounts — whether users fail dubious facial recognition tests or use VPNs — rather than risk enormous fines.

The ban will also dramatically reduce the information children are exposed to under the guise of eliminating harm, consolidating the flow of information into state-approved sources. The result is a shrinking public square for children, where they are excluded not only from accessing political ideas but from participating in them, losing the ability to comment, share, and interact with political content online.

At its best, social media has broken the hold of traditional media and created a space for otherwise marginalized voices. As community membership and participation decline across the West, social media has filled the gap, offering young people a sense of belonging and a forum in which to engage with others who share their views.

These platforms have not only provided a space for alternative viewpoints but also a vehicle for political socialization outside the control of the state. Consider the 15-year-old politically conservative child living in Australia. Before social media, they had no reprieve from the politically progressive, government-mandated National Curriculum. Until now, their escape had been online: anti-establishment podcasters and commentators made famous through social media, including figures such as the late Charlie Kirk, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan.

For young people, social media is the new news. Generation Z and Generation Alpha are not turning to television screens or broadsheets to form their views; they are looking to their phones. According to a report from the University of Canberra’s News and Media Centre, Instagram is the most widely used platform for news among 18-24s, where 40% of people in that age range used it to access the news, more than doubling the average access rate of other age groups.

The popularity of short videos for news is reflected in Tik Tok’s rising popularity, where 36% of 18-24 year olds use it for news. This trend no doubt extends to Gen Z’s successors, Generation Alpha, who have grown up as social media natives. These young Australians, who are tomorrow’s voters, play a unique role in rendering traditional news media increasingly irrelevant.

A cynic might wonder whether this helps explain the enthusiasm for the ban among parts of the legacy press. News Corp, Australia’s largest media conglomerate, ran the “Let Them Be Kids” campaign, including a petition that gathered more than 50,000 signatures. It argued that “a generation of children is being lost to the billion-dollar social media giants because they are putting profits before people.”

The same argument had been advanced for years by news organizations lobbying governments to force social media companies to compensate them for news content. This has culminated in the design of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Incentive, under which, if implemented, tech giants could face a near $1 billion levy on their Australian revenue unless they strike deals with local outlets. Viewed in this light, the legacy media campaign against social media looks less like child protection and more like an effort to eliminate competition.

Whatever the motivation, teenagers will bear the cost. The issue is now before the High Court, where two 15-year-olds have launched a constitutional challenge arguing the ban impermissibly burdens the implied freedom of political communication. As one of the plaintiffs, Macey Newland, argued, “Democracy doesn’t start at 16 as this law says it will.”

The social media ban reflects a dangerous and familiar pattern: governments begin by regulating in the least controversial domain—children’s safety—and then expand those mechanisms into speech and access to information. As Australia’s eSafety office collaborates with the EU Commission and the UK’s Ofcom on frameworks for “media literacy”, “critical thinking”, and “confident, informed online engagement,” the underlying assumption is that citizens, adults included, cannot be trusted to discern truth for themselves.

What begins as protection ends as paternalism. And what starts with children does not stay with them.

Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, where she focuses on the policy areas of freedom of speech and religious freedom throughout Australia.

In Ohio, a rapper posted music videos calling officers who raided his home “white supremacists” and worse. Last week, a jury rejected the officers’ $3.9 million lawsuit against him. In Germany, a man was fined for calling a senior politician a “lying piece of [poop emoji].”

The contrast captures something extraordinary about American law: public officials in the United States face far steeper barriers when they try to punish even caustic criticism than in other liberal democracies.

The successful defendant was Joseph Foreman, the rapper known as Afroman, known for the 2000 song, “Because I Got High.” In August 2022, officers searched Foreman’s home under a warrant seeking evidence of kidnapping and drug trafficking, but the investigation resulted in no criminal charges.

Using videos recorded by his wife and home security cameras, Foreman turned his anger into art, creating songs and music videos about the raid, including some pointed language that used names and images of the officers involved.

In an Instagram post, he referred to one of the officers as an “ADAMS KKKOUNTY SHERRIF LIEUTENANT.” Foreman’s narration of the videos included lines such as “Did you have to traumatize my kids? Will you pay me for doing me wrong?” while also making statements such as, “Bring back the money that you stole.”

Under the First Amendment, police officers and other government officials face an incredibly steep climb in convincing a court to punish speakers for even the sharpest criticism. And thanks to a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, New York Times v. Sullivan, public officials in defamation cases must establish “actual malice,” which means that the defendant either knew that the statement was false or recklessly disregarded its falsity.

Yet several U.S. politicians, including President Trump, commentators, and even Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, are increasingly questioning whether New York Times v. Sullivan and other robust protections for freedom of speech should continue in light of the immense and novel challenges that we face with online speech.

But Americans who have fallen out of love with the First Amendment’s free speech exceptionalism should consider what might replace it.

Foreman’s victory was not a legal fluke. It reflects a broader American principle: public officials are supposed to endure a degree of ridicule, insult, and even reckless unfairness that many of their counterparts in Europe can more easily punish.

In Germany, for instance, insulting politicians and government officials can result in criminal charges. In 2024, after a 25-year-old student greeted two police officers with “There’s that racist club again,” the Stuttgart Regional Court imposed a fine for the insult. German criminal law provides politicians with heightened protection against insults and defamation, and truth is not a defense.

In 2024, there were 4,500 investigations of such offenses in Germany. Current Chancellor Friedrich Merz and former vice‑chancellor Robert Habeck have each triggered hundreds of criminal investigations against citizens for allegedly insulting them, often over coarse tweets and memes. Merz has gone after critics who called him a ‘racist asshole,’ and in 2024, a man was fined for calling Habeck a “lying piece of [poop emoji]”.

Even without criminal insult and defamation laws, European public officials can use the civil defamation system to impose substantial costs on speech, as the officers attempted to do with Foreman. Last year, the clerk of Fleggburgh Parish Council in England was awarded £20,000 after suing a parish councillor who accused him of dishonesty and threatening behavior in Facebook posts.

And outside of the United States, such attempts may be more likely to succeed, as the defendant often has the burden of proving the truth.

Such fragile protections of free speech would endanger innumerable Americans who think nothing of excoriating their public officials and elected representatives. From memes of Joe Biden as senile to comparisons of ICE-agents as Gestapo goons and South Park’s constant mockery of Donald Trump, all such speech could conceivably be jeopardized should America move in a more European direction.

Afroman’s case demonstrates why the protection of vulgar, offensive, and provocative speech is a virtue, not a vice, in an open democracy where power is derived from the people. This wisdom was clearly recognized by the architect of the First Amendment, James Madison, who held that this provision codified “that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

James Madison and Afroman would seem to have almost nothing in common. One is a distinguished statesman who helped design a constitutional republic in prose of measured precision; the other is an irreverent artist who answered a police raid with profanity, parody, and a camera.

Yet Foreman’s case vindicates Madison’s deepest insight: that freedom depends on denying public officials the power to punish those who hold them up to scorn. The speech may be vulgar, exaggerated, and offensive. That is precisely the point. A right that protects only respectful dissent is no right at all.

Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. Jeff Kosseff is a nonresident senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech. They are the authors of The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (forthcoming 2026).

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This Week at a Glance 🔎

— 🇺🇲 Pentagon to Remove Media Offices after Court Rules Against Press Limits

— 📱 Meta and YouTube Held Liable in Social Media Addiction Trial

— 🇬🇧 UK Fines 4Chan Over Age Verification Failures

— 🇨🇳 Hong Kong Book Shop Arrested Over ‘Seditious’ Publications

— 🇬🇳 Guinea Decree Dissolves 40 Political Parties

First of All 🇺🇲

» Rapper Prevails in Defamation Suit Brought by Police

• Rapper ‘Afroman’ has prevailed in a defamation lawsuit brought by Ohio police who raided his home in 2022 on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping, whom he had mocked in music videos and social media posts.

• Background:

  • Half a dozen armed officers from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office raided the home of Afroman, whose legal name is Joseph Foreman, on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping, though no evidence was yielded or charges filed.

  • Foreman claims that the officers broke his gate and security surveillance wiring, took $400 in cash, and frightened his wife and kids, then 10 and 12, who were present during the raid.

  • According to Afroman, he asked himself, “as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops,” and found that the only solution was to “make a funny rap song about them.”

  • This was the starting point for his 14-track album, Lemon Pound Cake, which includes songs like “The Police Raid,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and more, and features footage of the raid he recorded on his home surveillance system in the music videos.

  • Afroman also posted memes and sold merchandise satirizing the incident, criticizing deputies’ appearances, and even making more serious allegations related to extramarital affairs and pedophilia amongst department members.

• The Lawsuit:

  • Afroman maintained that his reaction to the raid was “the smartest, most peaceful solution,” but law enforcement officers alleged that his unauthorized use of likenesses hurt their reputations and interfered with their official duties and sued him for $3.9 million in damages.

  • A jury agreed with Afroman’s lawyers that his response was protected speech, and commenters have even remarked that the trial has backfired, drawing more attention to the content.

» Pentagon to Remove Media Offices After Court Finds Its Press Limits Unconstitutional

• The Defense Department has said it plans to remove media outlets’ office spaces from the Pentagon after a federal judge found that recent press restrictions on reporters’ access to the building are unconstitutional.

• Context:

  • Dozens of reporters sacrificed their Pentagon access credentials by refusing to sign a revised press pass policy that required journalists to pledge not to gather information that has not been expressly authorized for release, as mentioned in a previous Free Flow.

  • The New York Times sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon in December, claiming the new policy violates journalists’ constitutional rights.

  • On March 20, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., ordered the Pentagon to reinstate the credentials of 7 Times journalists and struck down some of the agency’s restrictions on reporting.

• What’s Next:

  • An area of the Pentagon known as the “Correspondents’ Corridor,” which reporters have used to cover the U.S. military for decades, will immediately close.

  • Journalists will eventually be able to resume work from an “annex” outside the building, though it is unclear when the annex will be available.

  • The Times has said it intends to take the Pentagon back to court. The Defense Department is appealing Friedman’s decision.

» ICE Officers Taking DNA Samples From Protesters

• Several protesters arrested by ICE officials while observing officers’ activity, who have not been charged, have told NPR that officers took samples of their DNA.

• Details:

  • NPR reviewed footage from an individual named Ben, who was on the side of the road filming officers when he was tackled, held down, and dragged into their vehicle.

  • He was then held in custody for three hours, where officers collected his DNA sample by swabbing his mouth with a Q-tip.

  • Ben suffered broken ribs and blunt chest trauma from the impact.

  • Five other people described similar occurrences under oath as part of lawsuits against the Trump administration: that they were arrested seemingly without provocation while protesting ICE, and then had officers take or attempt to take what appeared to be a sample of their DNA.

• The Risks:

  • It is unclear where the samples acquired from protesters are ending up or how they are being used, and administration officials continue to deny the existence of a protester database.

  • Previously, DNA specimens collected by immigration officers were stored in a national FBI database, and local law enforcement agencies could access these tests, which can reveal broad information about a person, including their likelihood of having certain personality traits.

» Nashville Reporter Released on Bond from ICE Custody

• Estefany Rodríguez Flórez, a reporter for Nashville Noticias, has been released from ICE custody after she was detained on March 4, as mentioned in a previous Free Flow.

• Details:

  • Rodríguez was accused of violating her visa conditions, although her attorneys have cited court records showing that she lawfully entered the U.S. and has applied for political asylum and legal status through her husband, who is a citizen.

  • She also has a valid work permit and no criminal history, and her attorneys argue that she was targeted for her reporting that was critical of ICE.

  • Flórez was held in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, and released on $10,000 bond.

  • The habeas case against her allegedly warrantless arrest will continue, including claims that her First Amendment rights were violated in retaliation for her critical reporting of ICE activity.

» FIU Student Sues University Over Investigation into Group Chat

• Florida International University law student Abel Carvajal has sued the school over its investigation into an offensive group chat he created with conservative students and leaders.

• Details:

  • The Miami Herald and The Floridian reported on the leaked WhatsApp conversations, where variations of the N-word were mentioned more than 400 times, and descriptions of ways to violently kill Black people were included.

  • Following the controversy, Carvajal resigned as secretary of the Miami-Dade Republican Party and received notice from FIU that he was being investigated for creating and managing the group chat in which “individuals posted statements threatening to harm others.”

  • Carvajal’s lawsuit argues that FIU’s investigation constitutes viewpoint discrimination and that “no illegal speech or categories of unprotected speech” were included in the group chat.

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The Digital Age 🤖

» Meta and YouTube Held Liable in Social Media Addiction Trial

• A California state court jury has found both Meta and YouTube liable in a lawsuit accusing the platforms’ design and operation of harming their child users.

• Background:

  • The case was brought by a 20-year-old known as “KGM” in documents, who claims her addiction to social media exacerbated her mental health struggles.

  • Meta and Google’s YouTube were the only two remaining defendants in the case, following settlements by TikTok and Snapchat.

• In Court:

  • Lawyers for KGM argued that design features intended to “hook” young users, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and notifications, amounted to negligence in causing her harm.

  • Jurors were told not to consider the content of the posts and videos KGM was exposed to per platforms’ liability shields provided in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

  • The juries found that the companies acted with malice and awarded KGM $3 million in damages, while they head back to decide on punitive damages.

• In another case in New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.

Our Take: Separating “addictive design” from editorial judgment shouldn’t be a workaround for the First Amendment and Section 230. The real causality, if this trend continues, won’t be Meta or YouTube, which can bear the costs, but small and mid-sized companies that can’t. — Ashkhen Kazaryan

» Kentucky Social Media Ban under 16 Bill Advances

• HB 227, a Kentucky law that would ban children under 16 from accessing social media sites without parental consent, has passed the House and awaits a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

• Details:

  • The legislation would require sites with $1 billion in annual ad revenue to verify users’ ages at account setup.

  • Platforms would be required to estimate the ages of users who have used the platform for 25 or more hours within the first six months of the legislation’s enforcement.

  • Users’ ages must be re-estimated after every 100 hours spent on the platform, though users with more than 7 years of continuous use on a specific platform will be exempt from estimation.

  • If companies have 80% confidence that the user is over 15, the account can be considered “adult,” and if a user is a minor with parental consent, platforms must disable addictive features and profile-based advertisements.

  • Users identified as minors who have not provided parental consent will have 30 days to dispute account deletion or provide consent.

  • The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Matt Lockett (R-Nicholasville), defended the legislation against free speech concerns, arguing the bill doesn’t contain restrictions on specific content and is “100% content neutral.”

The Brussels Effect: Europe and Beyond 🇪🇺

» UK Regulator Fines 4Chan Over Age-Verification Failures

• 4chan, an image-board website, has been fined £450,000 ($602,360 USD) by the UK’s internet regulator Ofcom for failing to comply with age-check requirements under the Online Safety Act.

• Details:

  • 4chan faces an additional £50,000 (approx. $66,920 USD) fine for failing to assess the risk of users encountering illegal material.

  • It also faces a £20,000 (approx. $26,770 USD) fine for failing to specify in its terms of service how users are to be protected from such content.

  • These come after 4chan was previously fined £20,000 for failing to respond to Ofcom’s requests.

  • The company has until April 2 to implement age-assurance measures, conduct a “suitable and sufficient” assessment of the risk of illegal harm, and rewrite its terms of service.

  • If it fails to do so, it could face daily penalties of up to £20,000.

  • 4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from OfCom, and the company’s lawyer, Preston Byrne, responded to the demands with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.

  • “In the only country in which 4Chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment,” Byrne wrote on X.

» EU Commission Investigates Snapchat Under DSA

• The European Commission has launched an investigation into Snapchat over concerns that the social media platform isn’t doing enough to protect kids under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

• Details:

  • Although it is Snapchat’s own policy to require users to be at least 13 to use the platform, the commission said Snapchat’s “age assurance” system is “insufficient” at effectively enforcing this age requirement.

  • Under the DSA, platforms must deliver an “age-appropriate” experience to users under 17, which the Commission argues Snapchat cannot do without effective age-verification systems in place.

  • The Commission alleged Snapchat may not be doing enough to protect minors from being contacted by “users with harmful intent, such as sexual exploitation or recruitment for criminal activities.”

  • The app is also accused of not adequately scrubbing underage users’ feeds of content about illegal or restricted products, including drugs, vapes, and alcohol.

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Free Speech Recession 🌍

» Hong Kong Book Store Staff Arrested Over ‘Seditious’ Publications

• Four staff members at an independent book shop in Hong Kong have been arrested on suspicion of selling ‘seditious’ titles, including a biography of Jimmy Lai, a convicted activist.

• Details:

  • “Knowingly selling a publication that has a seditious intention” is a criminal offense under Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.

  • Violators of the offence could face up to seven years behind bars, and 10 years if they are found to have colluded with an external force.

  • National security police reportedly arrested the staff and raided the bookstore, known as Book Punch, seizing allegedly seditious publications.

» Guinea Government Dissolves 40 Political Parties

• Guinea’s Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralization announced the dissolution of 40 political parties for their “failure to meet their obligations,” stripping them of their legal status and banning them from political activity, including the use of their names, logos, emblems, and other symbols.

• Details:

  • The decree has sparked backlash from the country’s main opposition figure, Cellou Dalein Diallo, who accused President Mamadi Doumbouya of trying to build a “party state.”

  • Several political parties and media outlets have been suspended, and numerous opposition leaders and civil society figures have been arrested or exiled under Doumbouya’s rule.

» Russian Authorities Thwart Protests Over Telegram Restrictions

• Authorities in nearly a dozen regions across Russia have refused to authorize protests over the blocking of the messaging app, Telegram, and internet blackouts.

• Details:

  • Officials have used various excuses to block rallies, including “tree inspection,” snow removal, ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, and even claims that the protests have no underlying cause.

  • Activists have scaled back protests into smaller, indoor gatherings, even if demonstrations are not focused on the war, while some have gone to court to challenge officials’ refusals.

  • This is the latest example of such demonstrations being limited or restricted, from protests against the jailing of local activists, cattle culling, labor demands, car registration fees, animal cruelty, and more.

  • An activist from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk said that the city has allowed small, authorized rallies because “the authorities are trying to give people an opportunity to vent, so that the tension doesn’t build up.”

  • However, even there, protesters against internet censorship were arrested at a square that did not even require authorization for demonstrations, but had been taped off for a purported “tree inspection.”

» CNN Segment Discussing Chinese Censorship Censored in Real-Time

• While CNN’s Beijing correspondent, Mike Valerio, began describing topics that trigger censorship in China, the feed was interrupted with colored bars that say “Please stand by.”

• Details:

  • Valerio warned audiences in China about what they would see if their feeds were censored, and as he went on to discuss how President Trump’s strikes in Iran are perceived to serve Chinese interests, viewers in China saw their feeds interrupted in the exact way Valerio described.

  • “Anddd we’re being censored right now, just so you know,” Valerio reported, “Color bars are up,” while the feed to U.S. audiences was uninterrupted.

  • The footage shows the real-time capabilities of Chinese monitoring and censorship, as Valerio’s interview with Elex Michaelson was repeatedly cut as soon as they mentioned specific topics.

» Filmmaker on Trial in Turkey for Screening Armenian Genocide Film

• Rojhilat Askoy, a Kurdish filmmaker, has gone on trial on charges of “publicly insulting the Turkish nation and state institutions” for screening “Aurora’s Sunrise,” an animated film about the Armenian genocide, in Turkey.

• Details:

  • Turkish courts have previously ruled that using the term “Armenian genocide” is a protected expression, and have acquitted two journalists of similar charges in July 2024.

  • However, the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the Diyarbakir province indicted Askoy, citing scenes and dialogues that portrayed the events of 1915 as genocide.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.

Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, where she leads initiatives to protect free expression and shape policies that uphold the First Amendment in the digital age.

Author’s Note: In a recent review paper—“Speech Repression and Threat Narratives in Politics: Social Goals and Cognitive Foundations,” published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences — I attempt to develop a theory explaining why activists across different historical and cultural contexts seek to regulate and suppress political speech. In this essay, I summarize the main ideas of that paper and focus in particular on the strategic and psychological motivations that lead people to restrict expression on moral and political topics.

I am grateful to Jacob Mchangama for inviting me to present this work here. I’d be more than grateful if you, reader, could take the time to read the paper and tell me what you think of my theorization — especially if you have critical thoughts. I’m going to keep working on this topic, theoretically and experimentally. I will end the post with a few thoughts on my own experience of self-censorship on “taboo” topics of human behavior approached from a naturalistic lens in French academic social science. All the references to the claims I’m making in this post can be found in the paper.

If you’ve spent time online in the past decade, you’ve witnessed it: someone says something judged as “offensive,” and the backlash is swift. Calls to “cancel” them, demands they be deplatformed, accusations of spreading “harmful” or “offensive” ideas. This happened on both the left and the right, particularly in the U.S., despite both sides claiming to champion free speech. The left worries about speech that might harm marginalized groups, while the right tries to ban critical race theory or discussions of the social influences on gender from schools.

Instances of speech repression taking place online are modern instances of an eternal tendency to restrict speech judged as “dangerous.” In the 1950s, the U.S. was seized with an anti-communist panic where anyone suspected of having left-wing sympathies was considered a facilitator of Soviet influence. The Catholic Church persecuted heretics. Etc.

What is striking is how little this dynamic respects ideological boundaries. Progressive activists typically seek to restrict speech they perceive as harmful to marginalized groups. Conservative activists, meanwhile, have pushed to prohibit the teaching of critical theories of race or the family entirely from school curricula. The censored content differs, but the underlying impulse is the same. Speech repression, in other words, is politically and historically ubiquitous.

An Interdisciplinary Perspective

So why, across such different ideological contexts, do people engage in speech repression? My paper reviews the research I believe is most relevant for understanding why motivations to repress speech tend to recur during periods of perceived social threat — highly polarized political environments, moral panics, or moments when narratives about hostile outgroups become prominent.

My analysis draws primarily on experimental political science, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and social cognition research, supplemented by historical studies (but those are somewhat outside of my specialization as a political psychologist). Academic career tracks and our own cognitive limitations push us to read mostly and contribute to work within a given discipline. I believe this is quite suboptimal because interdisciplinary efforts are absolutely required to make theoretical progress in social science and psychology.

Speech repression, I argue, is precisely the kind of cross-cultural phenomenon that benefits from such an interdisciplinary approach.

That Political Narratives Are Simplistic and Often Held Rigidly Is A Feature, Not A Bug

Attempts to restrict speech often aim to protect mobilizing political narratives.

These narratives typically point to a collective threat and encourage coordinated collective action against it: racism, sexism, communism, capitalist exploitation, enemies of the faith, and so on. The ideological narratives rarely capture the full complexity of social reality. Instead, they tend to be simplified, dualistic, and moralized accounts of conflict between groups, often attributing greater intentional malice to adversaries than the empirical evidence would justify.

This simplification may appear puzzling from the perspective of rational cognition. One might expect individuals to benefit from forming nuanced and accurate beliefs about the social world.

In many domains, this is indeed the case. If I enter a dark room and collide with a table I did not know was there, I immediately revise my mental model of the room. Updating beliefs based on new evidence is clearly adaptive when dealing with directly observable physical phenomena, i.e., when dealing with what psychologists call “intuitive beliefs.”

But political narratives are rather different psychological objects. They are “reflective beliefs”: explicit beliefs about highly abstract social phenomena — macroscopic patterns of inequality, group conflict, or hidden conspiracies — which are next to impossible to test and falsify through everyday experience. As a result, these narratives can persist even when they oversimplify reality and are contradicted by evidence. Moreover, political narratives often incorporate features that make them cognitively attractive: strong threat cues, which capture attention, and conceptual simplicity, which makes them easy to understand, remember, and communicate.

From this perspective, political narratives function less as precise descriptions of the world than as tools for mobilizing and coordinating cooperation and signaling moral commitments. Political narratives are the best illustration that there can be social benefits from mischaracterizing social reality.

Hyper-Sensitive Threat Detection

Human cognition appears to be calibrated to detect threats very easily — much like a smoke detector designed to trigger false alarms rather than miss a real fire. This principle helps explain a wide range of phenomena, from the prevalence of conspiracy theories to disproportionate fears about unlikely dangers. In evolutionary fitness terms, the cost of ignoring a genuine threat could be much higher than the cost of reacting to a false alarm.

In particular, it is the detection or avoidance of social threats to which human minds appear deeply wired. Coordinated social threats from other human groups can be highly lethal, so there have been deep selection pressures on abilities to detect them and coordinate group cooperation in response, often using fear-mongering rhetoric. Our minds evolved a high responsiveness to information suggesting that a group—whether ethnic, ideological, or religious—poses a danger to our community or threatens our way of life.

This is where engaging in speech repression can become useful: to preserve prosocial commitments and mobilizations, in particular against perceived threats and political outgroups.

Controlling Beliefs and Controlling Common Knowledge

“Let’s hope it’s not true; but if it is true, let’s hope that it does not become widely known.” (possibly apocryphal quote attributed to Lady Ashley, speaking of Darwin’s theory that humans descended from apes)

Given their mobilizing power, ensuring that political narratives are widely disseminated in society and protected from criticism becomes at stake in fierce political battles of influence among political leaders and activists. This is because statements about threat operate as cognitive “vectors” that push, with varying degrees of force, toward more investment in cooperative efforts.

From the perspective of an ideological entrepreneur concerned with maintaining widespread support for their cherished cause, free speech poses a risk. It creates the danger that views nuancing the salience of a threat or the benefits of a mobilization — against say structural racism or communism — can travel through social networks and reach an increasing number of people.

Often, I suspect that activists repress speech because they seek to prevent the social dissemination of communicated information perceived as having the potential to “dilute” accounts of social threat and undermine prosocial commitments. Activists often worry that dissenting views—even if true—might weaken their cherished mobilization against their most feared foe.

In this context, trying to regulate and repress speech can make sense through at least two mechanisms.

The first is straightforward persuasion. Activists fear that exposing people to arguments defending racism, authoritarianism, communism, or other morally condemned positions might lead some individuals to adopt those views privately and adopt less prosocial, less regulated behaviors.

But a second mechanism is arguably equally important: the creation of common knowledge. When ideas are expressed publicly — through textbooks, speeches, or widely shared media — not only do individuals encounter them; everyone knows that everyone else has encountered them. This shared awareness can alter expectations about social norms.

If discriminatory or authoritarian arguments become widely visible, people may infer that such views are becoming more socially acceptable. This perceived shift in norms could embolden individuals who might otherwise hesitate to act on prejudiced attitudes.

The fear, then, is not merely that individuals will change their private beliefs. It is that public discourse might reshape shared perceptions of what others believe and what behaviors are socially tolerated. Hence, efforts to restrict the “dangerous” speech.

Punishment and Deterrence

To the extent that “dunking on” or punishing dissenting discourse is done publicly — in front of a large audience — it can also be a way of saying: “don’t mess with us,” “don’t you dare question the cause / qualify this sacred idea.”

I see this as a variant of the mobilization-maintenance motivations I just described. Here, you try to prevent the dissemination of demobilizing discourse by intimidating the source and publicizing the punishment to others. This motivation for cracking down on contrarian discourse is essential and falls in line with Steven Pinker’s analyses in “The cancelling instinct” from his last book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows (which I highly recommend: It develops ideas that are fairly similar to mine on the motivations for censoring political and scientific discourse, and came out the same month as my paper).

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Speech Repression as Signaling

Attempts to restrict political speech are not only outward-facing and meant to exert ideological influence. Punishing “dangerous” speech can also function as a signal of loyalty within the group, for personal benefit.

To care about a cause or group means being willing to sacrifice other things for it. By publicly condemning someone who challenges a particular ideological narrative, activists can try to demonstrate that they prioritize the cause above competing values such as intellectual openness, truth-seeking (if the censored discourse has evidence to back it up), or maintaining good relationships with the groups whose speech is restricted. In effect, the censors decide to intentionally burn bridges, precisely because this operates as a credible signal of commitment.

This can bring reputational benefits within one’s political community. Demonstrations of moral righteousness may be interpreted as evidence of integrity and dedication.

In that sense, speech restriction can be part of the wider phenomenon by which political communities reward intolerance of disagreement with an ingroup’s orthodoxy and punish efforts to understand other moral perspectives.

In sum, speech repression can simultaneously serve strategic goals both inside and outside one’s group (protecting a mobilizing narrative) and status goals within one’s political tribe.

Self-censorship as a form of signaling

The logic of reputational signaling also helps explain why people sometimes censor themselves — or even misrepresent their beliefs — when operating within environments dominated by strong political orthodoxies.

Political communities often expect their members to endorse certain core moral commitments. Under these conditions, refraining from expressing opinions that might be interpreted as expressing insufficient loyalty to a narrative or as politically demobilizing becomes a rational reputational strategy.

Human beings are, in fact, quite skilled at this kind of self-censorship. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann famously described spirals of silence, situations in which individuals collectively refrain from expressing opinions they believe are socially disapproved.

Timur Kuran identified even more active forms of this phenomenon. In what he called “preference falsification” and “knowledge falsification,” individuals publicly endorse beliefs they do not actually hold because expressing their real views would carry reputational costs.

Those individuals who don’t spontaneously self-censor to sound politically correct and fit in often strike most people in society as being “weird,” neuro-atypical.

When people underestimate how widespread this self-censorship is, the result can be pluralistic ignorance: a situation in which public discourse becomes grossly misaligned with private beliefs. Everyone hears the same dominant opinions expressed in public, and each person assumes others genuinely believe them. In reality, many individuals privately harbor doubts that no one dares to articulate. Some examples in U.S. contexts: criticism of Trump’s authoritarianism in MAGA bubbles; scepticism towards open border immigration policies or biological sex denialism among strong liberals.

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Does Speech Repression Reach Its Goals? Not Always.

Critically, speech restriction measures may or may not produce the effects activists intend. They may successfully suppress the diffusion of certain ideas, but the censors may very well provoke backlash, discredit themselves, and intensify conflict.

For the purposes of explaining why people try to cancel speech, however, it is sufficient that activists believe such measures will help achieve their goals. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Research in cultural evolution suggests that people often promote beliefs or practices when they believe doing so advances their objectives, even if those beliefs ultimately have little effect. The same logic likely applies to attempts to regulate speech.

This has important implications for democratic societies. Activists rarely anticipate the broader consequences of widespread self-censorship and echo chambers. When dissenting arguments disappear from public discussion, societies lose opportunities to identify errors in prevailing narratives or policies.

Similarly, if audiences are on average very attached to tolerance of disagreement or the pursuit of truth, active measures to repress putatively dangerous ideas by a political side can contribute to discrediting that political side in ways that its stronger proponents typically don’t anticipate. For instance, part of the anti-racist U.S. far left’s canceling attempts over the last ten years has had the effect of discrediting it among classical liberals attached to free expression, pushing those people more towards the right (e.g., James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, etc).

Cycles of mutual speech repression between political factions can thus escalate hostility and erode social trust in the long run. Speech repression is not often framed as such, but it is an essential manifestation and amplifier of affective polarization and distrust in elites.

Speech Repression Is Often Motivated By Sincere Convictions

It would be a mistake to assume that speech repressors are simply cynical or power-hungry. As far as the behavior of ordinary citizens is concerned, I would suspect that much speech repression is motivated by genuine prosocial commitments rather than by cynical power-seeking.

If one sincerely believes that certain ideas will lead to serious harms — racism, tyranny, moral decay, the collapse of the traditional family — restricting those ideas will feel like an act of protection rather than suppression. People often hold both moral and factual beliefs not because they have been proven true but because they seem necessary to uphold a moral order, a certain conception of a just society.

Moreover, there are strategic and reputational advantages to sincere belief. Individuals who genuinely endorse the values they advocate are typically more persuasive. They produce more convincing arguments, are more creative at finding rebuttals and post hoc rationalizations to objections, and are less likely to appear inconsistent.

Robert Trivers’ hypothesis of self-deception captures this dynamic: individuals’ cognitive systems may be evolutionarily calibrated to endorse socially important moral beliefs and narratives sincerely so that they can persuade others of their importance more effectively, and signal devotion to them.

If there’s one key finding in social psychology, it’s that human beings are remarkably adept not only at presenting their motives as virtuous but also at convincing themselves that those motives are genuinely noble.

Hypocrisy and the Defense of Free Speech

Psychological research consistently finds that people who appear motivated by universal moral principles are more trusted than those openly pursuing self-interest. It is therefore common for individuals to frame their actions in terms of broadly accepted principles such as justice, equality, or freedom. Free speech is one such principle.

Yet if the analysis developed above is correct, we should expect every political group to support restrictions on expression when doing so serves its perceived interests (e.g., mobilizations-maintenance and signaling). This means that commitments to free speech will often coexist with selective applications of that principle.

In practice, many people claim to endorse free expression in the abstract — often sincerely — while supporting censorship when speech threatens causes they care about. This does not necessarily reflect conscious duplicity. If Trivers’ ideas about self-deception are correct (they seem broadly correct to me, but they’re controversial), our cognitive architecture should make it easy to believe we’re guided by universal principles without seeing the myriad ways in which we apply the principles selectively.

This means that the institutional protection of free speech requires constant vigilance against deeply rooted features of human psychology. Namely, against our tendency to grant our own stated principles only to the ideas and groups we happen to like.

Self-Censorship in Academia: A Case Study

The dynamics of speech repression are not limited to professional politics or to online citizen mobilizations. They also appear in academic environments (the one I know best).

In the social sciences and humanities, political attitudes are heavily skewed toward the left. In France, this imbalance is particularly pronounced, shaped by the historical influence of Marxism, Bourdieusian sociology, anti-Americanism, and strands of anti-positivist and “post-modern” anti-science thought.

I personally identify with many left-leaning positions. I support stronger taxation of extreme wealth, share concerns about police violence (a big problem in la patrie des droits de l’homme), and stand with feminist movements against sexual violence. At the same time, I often find myself diverging from dominant leftist narratives on certain topics. I believe markets are extraordinarily powerful mechanisms for generating prosperity (by leveraging our natural selfish impulses), even if they require careful regulation. I also think that there can be genuine tensions between the tenet of sex equality and the cultural mindsets of certain immigrant populations from Muslim countries — the recognition of which has become incomprehensibly taboo on the left in my country.

My concern is that the strong (far) left-wing ideological homogeneity in academia in France can generate collective forms of motivated reasoning and motivated ignorance that undermine the truth-seeking mission of scientific research.

One example concerns the study of psychological sex differences and naturalistic approaches to human behavior more generally.

There is a basic principle in philosophy, articulated by David Hume and taught in every introductory ethics class: factual claims about the world do not logically imply normative conclusions. What it does not tell us is what ought to be. Full stop. The existence of average biological differences in motivation or ability between men and women — even if well-established — would not justify discriminating against any individual, any more than the existence of height differences between populations justifies treating tall people as superior.

Yet many professional researchers (paid by my parents’ tax euros to conduct impartial research) treat this as a live danger. Publish findings that suggest biological influences on socially desirable psychological sex differences, and someone, somewhere — the far right, masculinists — might use them to justify sexism. I’ll concede that the concern is not entirely without sociological basis. People do sometimes misuse scientific results to advance theses they already endorse. That’s impossible to control.

But the response — avoiding the empirical questions and making evolutionary hypotheses altogether taboo — is a non sequitur. You don’t protect against motivated misreading by refusing to publish anything. There will always be a risk that some people somewhere commit the fallacy of using empirical findings to justify questionable ends. And a bit of exposure to “biological” takes on sex differences won’t easily make Western generations committed to female emancipation fall back into XIXth century patriarchy.

The consequence is visible in the literature and seminar rooms. Strong social-constructionist accounts of gender have become effectively mandatory in parts of the social sciences — even when they conflict with cross-cultural data, with developmental psychology’s findings on the consistency of interest divergences between boys and girls across very different societies, and with the most elementary principles of evolutionary theory, whose predictions are richly confirmed in animal behavior. (Of course, the field is still moving, and some psychological sex differences on some traits have been found to be smaller than we thought. But the probability they don’t exist and never matter socially is close to zero).

Young scholars pick up the signal fast. Raising certain hypotheses attracts reputational costs. Worse, they are rarely exposed to naturalistic frameworks in the first place, both because few scholars feel safe working in that space and because the intellectual competencies needed to engage with it are never transmitted. When career advancement, passing peer review, and satisfying committees depend on peer approval, self-censorship becomes a rational strategy. It is, in the language of behavioral ecology, locally adaptive — even as it distorts the collective enterprise.

The result is a subtle distortion of academic inquiry and of the public discourse that looks at what academics say. Researchers avoid certain questions not because they lack scientific merit but because pursuing them could threaten prevailing moral narratives. This is already very bad for the goal of accurately informing the public.

But there is something worse: The costs of this dynamic are not confined to seminar rooms. They are concrete, and in some cases, they may fall on the very groups the dominant consensus claims to protect.

Medical research and women. For decades, biomedical research used male subjects as the default, on the tacit assumption that male and female bodies were interchangeable for research purposes. The results have been damaging sometimes: drug dosages calibrated on male physiology, cardiovascular disease systematically underdiagnosed in women, autoimmune conditions — which affect women at twice the rate of men — have been long under-studied. Recognizing biological and potentially psychological sex differences in medicine is a precondition for treating women properly.

Research on sexual violence and women. Evolutionary psychology has generated some of the most productive frameworks for understanding the conditions under which men commit sexual harassment and assault — including research on the situational triggers and male coalitional dynamics that modulate behavior that consists of surveilling and coercing women. Prevention programs that ignore the psychological mechanisms driving these behaviors — that treat sexual violence as purely a product of “patriarchal culture” or a willingness to exert “power” with no roots in sexual motives — are working with an impoverished model. You cannot effectively intervene in a phenomenon you do not seriously try to explain. Here too, the reluctance to engage with naturalistic accounts does not protect women. Ironically, it leaves them with weaker tools.

A glaring democratic contradiction. Our Western constitutional traditions rest on a commitment to pluralism, open inquiry, and the free contest of ideas — a hard-won recognition that no group, however well-intentioned, can be trusted with a monopoly on legitimate thought. Yet certain academic fields have become among the most ideologically homogeneous and censoring professional environments in modern society. The irony is sharp: institutions formally dedicated to truth-seeking, largely funded by the public, operating on a de facto consensus often on a par with that of political parties. A democracy should expect better from its universities.

A generation of scholars quietly squeezed out. There is today a cohort of young researchers — methodologically sophisticated, well-read in evolutionary biology and psychology, familiar with current cross-cultural datasets and experimental methods — who have learned to keep their heads down, or drifted out of academia altogether. Hiring committees are still dominated by older scholars who formed their identities in the 1980s when “evolutionary explanation” meant “genetic determinism” and “justification” of traditional sex roles. That caricature has long been overtaken by the data, with studies finding equally or almost equally left-wing mindsets in evolutionary social sciences and standard social sciences. But the profession is still largely, in effect, selecting for ideological and intellectual conformity under the guise of scientific judgment.

Conclusion

If the arguments outlined in my paper are correct, the struggle over free speech is not merely a conflict between enlightened defenders of liberal principles and illiberal censors. It requires a continuous fight against deep features of human psychology.

Political movements require motivating narratives. Human minds are highly sensitive to perceived threats. Public condemnation of dissent can signal loyalty and deter deviation. And individuals often sincerely believe that restricting speech serves the greater good.

These forces make pressures toward censorship persistent and recurrent. Defending free expression, therefore, requires institutions and cultural norms capable of resisting psychological tendencies that, in many other contexts, have historically served important social functions.

Antoine Marie is a postdoctoral researcher at CEVIPOF, Sciences Po in Paris. He is a political psychologist with a background in social psychology, political science, and cognitive science.