Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. We've done a number of shows and had many conversations about the recent case in California involving Facebook and YouTube, and, of course, social media, but I never really thought of it — I would never really discussed it in the context of free speech. There was an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal late last month by my guest and his fellow author, Jeff Kosseff, about this issue or this trial in the context of what the headline suggests: the timeless fear of corrupting the youth. I think this essay is part of an argument put forward in a new book, The Future of Free Speech, by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff. Jeff was actually on the show last year. So we've got Jacob on now. Jacob, congratulations on the new book, The Future of Free Speech. You're talking to us from Franklin, Tennessee. You're involved with the Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Before we get into the details of the book, Jacob, how does, in your view, this recent trial in California involving YouTube and Facebook connect with the issue of free speech?

00:01:53 Jacob Mchangama: Well, children have First Amendment rights, too. And so, when you're trying to say that product design is not really about speech, you're trying to essentially circumvent the First Amendment and Section 230. I know you've had a very long, heated discussion with Jeff Kosseff, my coauthor, about Section 230. And we placed these trials in the context of really a tsunami of laws — with age verification, prohibiting minors from accessing, from being on social media — based on the premise that the increase in mental health problems among teens is caused by their access to social media and smartphones. And, you know, I'm not an expert on those. I would just say that a lot of the experts on this do not necessarily agree that there's causation between screen time, smartphone time, social media use, and mental health problems — an argument prominently made by Jonathan Haidt, who's been the direct inspiration for some of these laws. But even if we do assume that there are direct harms, that should not be the end of it, because social media and smartphones are not like tobacco. Tobacco — if you smoke cigarettes, that is clearly dangerous to you, and there are no real benefits, specifically not benefits in terms of speech. But, yeah, my kids — when we moved from Denmark to Tennessee, I have two teenagers. I'm very concerned about their social media use and the time they spend on smartphones; I limit it through parental controls. But they also derive benefits from it. For instance, their viewing of videos means that their English is completely fluent, that they understand the cultural idioms of their peers in school, making it easier to integrate. My son runs a car detailing business. How do you start up a car detailing business? You watch online videos to help you, and so on. So in that sense, if you cut children off from social media or smartphones, you also cut them off from access to information that can be vital to some, especially maybe vulnerable communities. And then there's the whole problem that you will undermine privacy and anonymity through age verification. And, of course, if you go back throughout the history of free speech — Tom Paine's Common Sense was not written in the name of Tom Paine. Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was not written in the name of Baruch Spinoza. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was not written in the name of John Locke. They used anonymity or pseudonyms because that was a way of circumventing censorship. It was a way to make very important arguments while minimizing the risk of being punished. And the Internet works the same way. Lots of people say things, want to access and share information, but don't necessarily want their name out there — and for good reasons, because you can risk consequences for that. For instance, we see in a well-established democracy like Germany, politicians enjoy special protection against insults. So lots of powerful politicians have had the police turn up at the door of ordinary German citizens who said something these politicians don't like — which is a good reason why you want to be anonymous. You want to be able to speak truth to power.

00:05:53 Andrew Keen: You're quite an expert on free speech. Not only do you run the Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt, and you're the coauthor of this new book, The Future of Free Speech, but you're also the author of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media. So you know your free speech, Jacob. This new book suggests a global decline of democracy's most essential freedom. Where's the evidence of that? You mentioned the Internet. Of course, I'm not always particularly keen on social media. But when you go on social media, it seems as if — especially on a platform like X — you can pretty much say anything you want, which is why a lot of people think of it as rather distasteful. Where is the evidence, Jacob, of this global decline of free speech?

00:06:50 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. So there's a paradox here in that on the one hand, we've never had better access to information and a better ability to connect immediately with people around the world without prior censorship. That has exploded with the World Wide Web, with social media, now with generative AI. But at the same time, we're also living in a time where the original techno-optimistic promise has been turned on its head. So, you know, if you go back to the 1990s and early 2000s, that was an intensely optimistic time. Democracy was being spread to all corners of the world. It was sort of the peak of the third wave of democratization. And then the Internet came along, and there was this widespread belief that the Internet would make it impossible for governments to censor information again, and therefore censorship and authoritarianism would be consigned to the ash heap of history. In 2000, Bill Clinton, wanting to admit China into the WTO, says, "Yeah, sure, they're going to try and censor the Internet" — and then he laughs and says, "Well, good luck with that. That's like nailing Jell-O to a wall." And I think the Chinese have perfected the art of nailing Jell-O to a wall. And so essentially we had that period where the spread of democracy and free speech go hand in hand. But if you look at the data — first and foremost, if you look at data from the Varieties of Democracy project, probably the most sophisticated dataset of indicators — you see that the number of countries where free speech has declined has increased dramatically, whereas the number of countries where free speech is being strengthened is quite small. And that has gone hand in hand with a wider democracy recession.

00:09:05 Andrew Keen: You talk about recession — democracy recession. Is free speech, or in your view at least the decline of free speech, really the crisis of democracy these days? Is that why some people see democracy in some sort of existential crisis? You use the term recession. Some people might even use the word depression, or great recession.

00:09:30 Jacob Mchangama: No. I mean, one of the things I think is that a lot of people — you hinted at it — a lot of people in democracies view free speech as a threat to democracy. They have come to believe that the Internet, with social media, polarization, disinformation, spread of hate speech, and so on, threatens democracy. And therefore we need, in democracies, to have more regulation of speech. We need to do more to clamp down on social media. We need to do more to clamp down on disinformation. We need to do more to clamp down on hate speech. The argument in the book is that these attempts in democracies may be born out of good intentions, but they are extremely counterproductive. And they ignore the fact that the history of democracy and freedom is built on the back, if you like, of speech, and has gone hand in hand with the expansion of speech. And also that the number one indicator for authoritarian states — or states that are moving towards authoritarianism — is that they focus on limiting free expression. And I think in many democracies, we've come to take free speech, the benefits of free speech, for granted and focus almost exclusively on the dark sides, the ugly sides of free speech, which admittedly are more visible today because of the digital environment that we live in. But once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we're starting to see that now in democracies where some of these laws I've talked about have real consequences far beyond their intended scope.

00:11:29 Andrew Keen: Before we get to some of those consequences, I know there's an autobiographical element here. You grew up in Denmark where, as you've said, most Danes considered free speech to be not a matter of debate because it was as natural as breathing the air. And then, of course, came the famous 2005 Mohammed cartoon controversy. Have you been shaped, Jacob, by this controversy — growing up in Denmark, which does have, from the outside, a tradition of being a paragon of openness, of free speech, of toleration. How did this 2005 cartoon scandal shape not just Denmark but yourself?

00:12:20 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. I think it's the main reason why I've dedicated my professional life to free speech, because, as I say in that quote, I took free speech for granted. I didn't really think much about free speech because it was essentially a value that had been won. And the last place in Denmark where you would have thought any sort of existential threat to free speech might come from was religion. And then suddenly you have the cartoon crisis, where a Danish newspaper published these cartoons — and I applaud you for actually showing them, because many mainstream newspapers would not, even though it's obviously relevant to show them: what is this actually about? And what I saw —

00:13:07 Andrew Keen: That media — I mean, why wouldn't you show it?

00:13:09 Jacob Mchangama: Well, because a lot of people have lived with death threats, and some have been killed. I've used them; I've never had any problems. But you never know — and that's one of the problems. There are people out there in the world who are willing to kill because of religious doctrines. And that was something that we had thought in Denmark had long since gone away. And what I saw in Denmark was large parts of the left — who saw themselves as the heirs to Enlightenment values — suddenly saying: free speech is good, but you can't use it to punch down on a vulnerable minority, here being Muslims, where they interpreted these cartoons as an attack on all Muslims. When in fact, if you read the accompanying editorial, it talks about the importance of free speech applying to all. So if you really believe in equality for all, it would be very weird to have a situation where one group in a society enjoys special protection from having their taboos questioned or criticized or ridiculed, and others do not. But what I also saw in Denmark was — and, of course, it's perfectly fine to find the cartoons distasteful or offensive. It's also perfectly fine to use speech to condemn them morally if you think they're a needless provocation. That depends on individual taste; there's no real right or wrong answer. I thought they were contributing to an important debate, but that's my point of view — that's not a universal truth. The problem is that people were willing to use violence. There were several terrorist threats and attacks. The editor who commissioned the cartoons became a friend of mine. He had to live for a decade with round-the-clock security from the Danish intelligence services because people wanted to kill him — because he had asked people to draw cartoons with pens, and they wanted to come after him with AK-47s.

00:15:26 Andrew Keen: I remember this came on top of the Rushdie fatwa.

00:15:31 Jacob Mchangama: All of that came after the Rushdie fatwa. And ten years later was the Charlie Hebdo attack. The attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris — this French left-wing satirical magazine, which had been one of the few magazines that had shown solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper, and actually republished the cartoons as an act of solidarity. And that was one of the main reasons why twelve people were murdered that day when two jihadists entered their offices and gunned them down.

00:16:02 Andrew Keen: Right. So, again, we don't need to go over all of this. Is the argument in The Future of Free Speech — and we've done a lot of shows on this sort of thing — are you arguing against wokeness? Are you suggesting that the real problem these days with free speech is the left's toleration of minorities, worrying about insulting Muslims or people of different skin colors or genders or sexualities or economic status? Is that the core politics of The Future of Free Speech? Is that why you think there's a global decline? Is it coming from the left, Jacob?

00:16:43 Jacob Mchangama: No. And right now in this country, a lot of the people who talk a big game about free speech, and who complained — I think with some merit — about cultural censorship coming from the left, are now enthusiastically embracing restrictions from the Trump administration that have come from the government. Fortunately, the United States has a very robust protection of political speech in the First Amendment, where courts have by and large hindered the most vindictive and punitive attempts to silence critics by the Trump administration. But I don't know of a recent American administration that has gone to such lengths to punish criticism as the Trump administration has. And I think this is one of the reasons why — what you talked about before — there's been this uneasiness on the left about free speech, because: free speech allows people to say things about minorities, and therefore we need to restrict it. One of the things we argue in this book — we have a chapter called "Four Hateful Men" — it shows how some of the most important US Supreme Court decisions that protect free speech deal with extremely hateful people, people who are viciously antisemitic or even members of the KKK. And very often, you had civil rights organizations — Black and Jewish groups — defending them out of principle, because they acknowledged that if you're a minority, a vulnerable and persecuted minority, you depend more than a majority on the ability to challenge power. You depend on a principled protection of free speech. Unfortunately, that history has largely been forgotten, I think, by many. So free speech can, depending on circumstances, be under attack from the left, from the right, even from centrists. What we argue for is a robust, principled, consistent protection of free speech. But what we also do is say: it's not enough for free speech advocates such as ourselves to just talk about John Stuart Mill, or the importance of being principled, or the dangers of the slippery slope. We point to concrete tools that are fueled and empowered by free speech — things you can use, such as counter speech, crowdsourced fact-checking, radical transparency, and so on — instances that have actually been implemented around the world, and that are a much healthier alternative to censorship and speech restrictions.

00:19:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And in that sense, your concern — both from the left and the right — I think it reflects or echoes Greg Lukianoff from FIRE. He's been on the show a number of times. I know you work closely with him. A couple of years ago he came on worrying about the left; then he was on last year suggesting that, like you, he fears the right in some ways more than the left these days. Going back to John Stuart Mill, who of course is the father — I'm not sure of free speech, but certainly of liberalism — you're the historian of free speech, and I know you go way back before Mill in your book, back to Socrates and Demosthenes in antiquity, through to Abu Bakr al-Razi and Ida B. Wells in more modern history. Are you, like Mill, a utilitarian when it comes to free speech? After all, the philosophical question is: why should we care about free speech? What's the big deal? So what? Are you and Jeff — are you personally in this book and in your thinking — are you a utilitarian? Are you suggesting that the best argument in favor of free speech is that it enables, I don't know, social progress?

00:21:00 Jacob Mchangama: I am actually not — well, I don't want to speak for Jeff. I am not one of those who believes in one free speech theory to rule them all. I think there are a number of very strong justifications for free speech that are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. So utilitarianism is a big part of it. I think it's absolutely undeniable that free speech has gone hand in hand with social progress — at least if you buy into a broadly liberal democratic mindset. It has also been instrumental for scientific progress. But I also think there's a very strong moral component to free speech. Freedom of conscience, you know? Baruch Spinoza — the famous early Enlightenment Dutch Jewish philosopher — said something along the lines that it's a natural right for everyone to have the freedom to think what they want and say what they think, and that it is tyrannical for any government to try to censor that. If you can't speak your mind, how can you be free? So that's an intensely moral argument. And more broadly, we call it democracy's most essential freedom because I do believe it serves as a meta-right for democracy. It is essential for a number of goods, both consequentialist and moral in nature.

00:22:49 Andrew Keen: Let's go back to Haidt — because perhaps not H-A-T-E, but Jonathan Haidt —

00:22:55 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah.

00:22:58 Andrew Keen: Awkwardly named. Do you think that people like Haidt offer a liberal threat to free speech in the sense that, when it comes to technology, they take away agency? They suggest, particularly with children, that children don't have the agency to say no. You compared it to smoking earlier. Is the real danger to free speech, Jacob, in 2026 coming from people like Haidt?

00:23:43 Jacob Mchangama: I mean, Jonathan Haidt has done a lot to advance free speech and academic freedom.

00:23:48 Andrew Keen: Well, his own free speech. I don't know about anybody else's.

00:23:51 Jacob Mchangama: No — I mean, his earlier work, which is also why it's surprising.

00:23:55 Andrew Keen: With Greg Lukianoff, of course, that —

00:23:57 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. With Greg Lukianoff. And, you know, he founded Heterodox Academy, which works for academic freedom at universities and so on. And I admire a lot of his work. He's clearly a very intelligent person. And I also share some of his concerns, as I said. I think that in his earlier work he writes about the elephant and the rider — about how our prior beliefs essentially lead us to argue for certain things, so that we mold our arguments according to our prior beliefs: motivated reasoning. And I think there's an element perhaps of motivated reasoning in his crusade for age verification. I wouldn't say he's the biggest threat to free speech. I mean, China is obviously a huge threat to free speech globally. Russia is obviously —

00:25:02 Andrew Keen: Well, I don't know if China or Russia threaten free speech in the United States, do they?

00:25:07 Jacob Mchangama: Well, I would say that China tries very hard to export its cutting-edge technology with the purpose of censoring speech around the world. Russia tries to shape and change global norms that could ultimately have an impact on free speech around the world. But I do think that, yeah, centrists — well-intentioned liberal Democrats — can also be a threat to free speech. And this is something we've seen particularly after 2016, the US presidential election, where for a long time there was this narrative that Russian disinformation had contributed to deciding the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. I think this is a claim that has since been largely debunked, but it led to a lot of concerns about social media. Then you had COVID and the so-called infodemic. And in 2024, after generative AI became the big thing — 2024 was this super-election year where around two billion people were eligible to vote around the world — the alarmist headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post were that democracy risks drowning in disinformation. The World Economic Forum said that disinformation was the largest short-term threat against humanity. And what we saw was that those who studied these elections could not really identify AI-generated disinformation as having impacted an election. There was lots of use of it — some of it probably malicious, some intended to mislead — but there was no real evidence that it had shifted outcomes. And I think this is very typical of what I call elite panic. Every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology, the traditional gatekeepers tend to fret about the consequences of allowing the unwashed mob direct and unmediated access to information, because it's disruptive. And we do live in a disruptive age. Institutional authority has been eroded. Trust in cultural, academic, and media institutions is at an all-time low. And so we're trying to muddle our way through the new digital age. And I think that makes it tempting for well-meaning liberal Democrats to say: we need some kind of top-down control to try to create order out of the chaos.

00:27:52 Andrew Keen: So somebody like Haidt is an example of the panic of the elites against maybe free speech, or certainly some sort of freedom. We've got a show coming up in the next couple of weeks with the New York Times writer Gal Beckerman. He has a very interesting new book, How to Be a Dissident. You're a historian of free speech. Of course, you've written extensively in that book about Socrates — perhaps the original dissident. Is being a dissident, if that's the right word, about being brave enough to say what you think? You noted that I was brave to put this image up on Wikipedia, but I don't think there's any bravery in that — I mean, it's on Wikipedia. How does one, if indeed there is a global crisis of free speech, become a dissident? What do all of them — from Socrates to Demosthenes, whom you write about in your book, to Abu Bakr al-Razi, to, of course, the great Ida B. Wells — tell us about being a dissident in an age of retreating free speech?

00:29:17 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. I don't like to use the term dissident in the American context or in most liberal democratic states, just because — even though I warn that things are getting bad in liberal democracies — no one in the UK or America is facing —

00:29:40 Andrew Keen: Okay. But I take your point. With Navalny — let's put it in context — it's important when we talk about Iran or Russia.

00:29:48 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. Obviously, there it depends a lot on bravery, because there is no legal or institutional protection of your right to free speech. And so you have to be incredibly brave to criticize regimes when you know that can lead to your imprisonment, torture, or even death. And unfortunately, that is to a large extent how free speech has been won. People have spoken out against the power of monarchs, of churches, of rulers, of one-party states — often at a very high cost. And we have, especially in democracies, realized that the ability to do so is absolutely essential for pluralistic societies that respect the rights of the individual, and where no political party, no government, no regime can have a monopoly on truth. So that's important. But I would say that in democracies, we still need — I think, ultimately, the happy state of the First Amendment in the United States, even though it's under pressure, depends ultimately on a civic commitment to a culture of free speech. Meaning: if a critical mass of Americans decide that free speech is no longer worth defending or believing in as a basic principle, then very likely twenty years from now, the First Amendment will be interpreted very differently by future Supreme Court justices who don't share that belief in the free-speech exceptionalism that currently dominates First Amendment doctrine. And, of course, that has been the case in American history. It's actually relatively recent that the First Amendment really got teeth. For a very long time — if you were an opponent of American involvement in World War One, in the first half of the twentieth century, you could be sent to prison for ten years, and the Supreme Court said: yeah, that's fine, that's not protected speech.

00:32:14 Andrew Keen: We had an Albanian writer on the show — she's been on actually a couple of times, and you may be familiar with her work — Lea Ypi. She wrote a wonderful autobiography of growing up in Hoxha's Albania called Free. You probably have to go —

00:32:34 Jacob Mchangama: Yeah, I can't — just —

00:32:36 Andrew Keen: In the book, she tells the story of growing up — that her family invented a language to describe reality so that people wouldn't know what they were talking about. So they appeared to be talking about their uncles and their aunts, but they were actually using language to criticize the regime. The reason I bring her up is: aren't we humans always able to get around censorship? If you're not allowed to say certain things, we just figure out ways of saying them differently.

00:33:10 Jacob Mchangama: I mean, it's impossible to censor all speech. I think that is true. Human beings are resourceful, adaptable. So there will always be ways to challenge it, but you can certainly create an environment where lots of speech is being removed or chilled or self-censored. Imagine living in current-day China, where the online sphere, the digital sphere, is heavily censored through AI, where facial recognition technology is implemented into cameras, where you as a citizen are completely transparent to the government. That will obviously mean that you're very, very careful about what you say. And it will also, with time, mean that citizens — or most citizens at least — will no longer be aware of basic facts. I mean, it's not uncommon for younger, well-educated Chinese to not know what happened on Tiananmen Square — because it's an event that has been so heavily censored by the Chinese Communist Party that younger generations are simply not aware that a pro-democracy student movement was brutally suppressed, with many killed, not that long ago. So that's obviously a huge danger in countries with a lot of censorship. And also — if you have a government with censorship and you surround yourself with sycophants, there's a real danger that you end up making wrong and delusional decisions. Because you —

00:35:28 Andrew Keen: I can't imagine that scenario. Yeah. Let's end with AI. Some people see it as the end of humanity — I'm not sure what humanity actually means. How does AI threaten free speech, or how might it offer an opportunity for pushing back what you call this global decline? It's not possible to have a conversation about anything these days without bringing up AI. You touched on it earlier. There's a lot of hysterical talk about the impact of technology and social media. We began with the trial in Los Angeles finding YouTube and Facebook liable. What's the forecast from you — the expert on free speech — for AI? Are you excited, worried, a little bit of both?

00:36:25 Jacob Mchangama: I'm mostly excited and optimistic, but I'm also worried. So in the book, we talk about what we call creative AI and intrusive AI. Creative AI is the way that generative AI gives you superpowers on demand. I like to read The Odyssey and The Iliad, and I've used a chatbot essentially as a tutor — like a PhD-level tutor that gives me a depth of understanding that I couldn't have gotten on my own. I can set up agents that help me do research in real time at a depth and scope that would have been unimaginable before. So it gives us access to information and powers to do incredible things. But it's also true that AI can be supercharged to create the most intrusive regimes of surveillance and censorship the world has ever seen. If Hitler or Stalin had the powers that the Chinese Communist Party has now — that is a frightening thought in and of itself. And so, for me, it's crucial that the commitment to creative AI works. But there's a lot of talk about regulating it and saying we have to make sure that AI can never hallucinate, or that it doesn't spread disinformation, and so on. But if you have a commitment to what we call preemptive safetyism — well, AI is a general-purpose technology. You can use it for good or bad. The same way that this laptop I'm sitting with, with an Internet connection, I could use to send out scam emails, send out threats, mass-produce and easily distribute antisemitic neo-Nazi propaganda at a scale unimaginable to anyone in the time of the printing press. But we don't say you're only allowed to produce and sell laptops if you can't do illegal stuff with them, or have an Internet connection only if you can't do illegal stuff. And I think we have to think the same way about AI. We want to make sure we try to guard as best we can against catastrophic risks, but not filter information and ideas — because AI is also embedded into search, word processing, emails, and so on. If you allow a government or a company to filter AI, you essentially allow them to filter the entire ecosystem of ideas and information, and that is hugely dangerous.

00:39:14 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it — The Future of Free Speech. If I was in charge, I wouldn't allow the word, because it's so hard for podcast presenters like myself to pronounce — but I've done as good as I can, Jacob. Good job. Good way of presenting, defending, promoting free speech. It's an essential thing, and you're one of our leading exponents. The new book is out, coauthored with Jeff Kosseff, who was on the show last year. So good job with that. And this subject is certainly not going away. Maybe we'll get you on the show in future with your friend Greg Lukianoff. Thank you so much.

00:39:58 Jacob Mchangama: Thank you. It's a pleasure.