“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama
The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech, Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees the threat is real: the number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically. In 2000, Bill Clinton laughed at the idea that China might censor the internet. Over the last quarter century, China has perfected that art.
The decline doesn’t come from a single ideological camp, which is Mchangama’s most politically inconvenient point. He suggests that the left has convinced itself that hate speech regulation, age verification for social media, and disinformation controls are acts of democratic hygiene. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is overtly shutting down free speech at a scale unmatched in recent American history. And then there’s the paradoxical possibility that anti-social-media liberals like Jonathan Haidt, in their fervor to take freedom of online expression from kids, are also contributing to today’s great recession in free speech. Left, right, and center. America, China, Denmark. Nobody, it seems, wants to allow us to say anything anymore.
Five Takeaways
• The Editor Who Lived Under Protection. A decade of round-the-clock Danish intelligence services. He’d asked cartoonists to draw. They came after him with AK-47s. Then Charlie Hebdo.
• Democracy’s Varieties Are Shrinking. The most sophisticated dataset says the trend line is clear: declining countries vastly outnumber improving ones. Clinton laughed at China censoring the internet. China got the last laugh.
• Four Hateful Men. The most important First Amendment precedents protect the most despicable speakers. Black and Jewish organizations defended them on principle. Minorities need robust free speech more than majorities.
• Elite Panic Is the Historical Constant. Every new communications technology triggers gatekeeping hysteria. The 2024 AI disinformation apocalypse — the World Economic Forum’s top threat to humanity — never materialized. It never does.
• Creative AI vs. Intrusive AI. A PhD-level Homer tutor on demand. Or the most powerful surveillance state ever built. “If Hitler or Stalin had the powers the Chinese Communist Party has now.” Filter AI and you filter the entire ecosystem of ideas.
About the Guest
Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt University and the coauthor of The Future of Free Speech.
References
The Future of Free Speech by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 The California social media trial and the First Amendment
00:01:53 Why social media isn’t like tobacco: children’s agency and anonymity
00:05:53 The global free speech recession: Varieties of Democracy data
00:09:05 Is declining free speech the core crisis of democracy?
00:11:29 Growing up in Denmark: free speech as natural as breathing
00:12:20 The Mohammed cartoons and the editor who lived under protection
00:15:26 From the Rushdie fatwa to Charlie Hebdo
00:16:43 Free speech under threat from left AND right: Four Hateful Men
00:19:44 From Mill to Spinoza: free speech as democracy’s meta-right
00:22:49 Haidt, motivated reasoning, and elite panic over new media
00:29:17 Navalny to Nashville: what dissidents teach democracies
00:35:28 Creative AI vs. intrusive AI: superpowers and the surveillance state