The Censorship Arms Race

“It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” This prophetic warning came from James Madison in 1798 as the young American republic saw a rise in reactionary crackdowns in response to the French Revolution. Passed in the name of national security, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 struck at the heart of the very liberties Madison helped enshrine in the Bill of Rights. Alarmed by the rush to repress dissent in the name of national security, Madison saw clearly how external threats—whether real wars or political panics—often became justifications for silencing critics and curtailing fundamental freedoms.

Madison’s insights remain strikingly relevant today in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the escalating Israel-Palestine conflict. Governments around the world—authoritarian and democratic alike—have used war and instability to justify sweeping new limits on freedom of expression. Protest bans, media blackouts, blasphemy laws, and vague disinformation rules have proliferated under the banner of preserving public order or combating extremism. Once again, free speech has been caught in the crossfire.

The battlefront has also shifted into the digital realm. Social media platforms are no longer hailed as tools to give voice to the voiceless but are now seen, along with new generative AI platforms, as threats to democracy that require preemptive control. The story of how we got here is not one of a single villain or ideology but a tale of democratic backsliding, elite panic, and assaults on dissent, both online and in the real world.

The Free Speech Recession Escalates

A few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the European Union banned Russian state-sponsored media outlets, Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, from broadcasting to the EU. Officials cited Russia’s systematic attempts to manipulate democracies through disinformation, requiring search engines like Google to delist all search results from Sputnik or RT and mandating social media companies prevent users from sharing content from the blacklisted propaganda outlets.

In response to the EU’s ban, Russia cut its citizens’ access to Western state-sponsored media, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, which the Kremlin accused of spreading “false information” and “anti-Russian” sentiments. As of July 2024, more than three hundred people—among them prominent journalists, human rights defenders, and opposition politicians like fierce Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza—had been arrested in Russia for “dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Russian Armed Force,” a crime punishable by up to fifteen years in prison under a new provision added to the criminal code shortly after the invasion.

Soon, Europe opened up another front in the war against Russian disinformation with the adoption of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which significantly increased the European Commission’s powers to regulate online communication. The DSA aimed to replace the supposed Wild West of the internet with a rules-based digital order, where democratic institutions, not private tech companies and their billionaire owners, were the ultimate arbiters of the public square. Online platforms are required to quickly assess and remove illegal content, such as hate speech and other vaguely defined concerns, or face fines of up to 6% of their global revenue. The law also empowers the Commission to pressure companies into banning or blocking content that may be seen as unfavorable by bureaucrats in Brussels.

The largest search engines and social media platforms are also required to assess and mitigate “systemic risks,” which include vague and undefined categories of “disinformation” and the “manipulation of electoral processes.” As of now, what this means is anybody’s guess. But there are good reasons to fear that platforms will come under pressure to remove even legal content that the European Commission views as constituting “disinformation” or “foreign propaganda” or over-remove content to avoid massive fines.

In the United States, the First Amendment has prevented the federal government from imposing the same kind of overt political control of social media platforms that the EU’s DSA aims for. Nevertheless, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration pressured social media platforms to remove public health misinformation through a practice known as “jawboning,” in which the government leverages its influence to encourage platforms to remove content they are not legally required to delete. The Supreme Court declined to rule on the merits of a complaint against this practice, but it suggested that plaintiffs will need to clear a high bar to prove that communications between the government and social media platforms have violated the First Amendment.

More worrying free speech developments followed after the 2024 U.S. election, when Donald Trump secured a second term as president. His appointee and current FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, announced investigations into ABC for its DEI practices and CBS for various kinds of reporting. Meanwhile, Trump’s libel lawsuit against CBS is ongoing, while the Supreme Court dismissed a Trump ally’s effort to reverse a landmark decision—New York Times v. Sullivan—which shields newspapers from libel suits pursued by the government.

How to Fight Back

With democracies abandoning classical liberal values, emboldened authoritarians, increased political polarization, and collapsing trust in institutions, it is easy to despair. But there is reason for hope. Recently, widespread protests in Turkey, Serbia, Hungary, and Georgia have made a valiant effort to push back on regimes that punish dissent, although they, too, have been met with retaliatory crackdowns and arrests of protestors, both online and in the streets.

Despite this democratic backsliding, a recent global survey produced by my organization, The Future of Free Speech, found that respondents from both Hungary and Venezuela were among the most supportive of free speech among 33 countries surveyed, not just in principle but in practice. We are not just diagnosing the free speech recession; we are tracking it, analyzing it, and fighting back with data, tools, and policy blueprints. We have produced a suite of high-impact reports and resources to arm advocates, lawyers, and lawmakers with the tools to understand and counter the forces eroding free expression.

For instance, we recently mapped 217 legal developments across 22 democracies and found nearly 80% were speech-restrictive. From criminal defamation laws in Chile to sweeping online speech regulation in the EU, our findings show how censorship is creeping into open societies—and how international human rights norms offer a critical path forward.

We have also investigated how platforms are shaping public discourse. One report tracked the expanding scope of hate speech policies across eight social media platforms, showing how vague rules often silence minority speech. Another found that in France, Germany, and Sweden, up to 99.7% of deleted Facebook and YouTube comments were legal, raising concerns about over-removal in the wake of sweeping digital regulations. While concerns about its threat to democracy have been overblown, our review of generative AI policies found sweeping, ill-defined restrictions on controversial content, raising urgent questions about information access in the AI era.

But we aren’t just highlighting threats—we are focused on finding resilient solutions that empower individuals to harness the power of free speech to address societal harms. Through toolkits and trainings, we are arming practitioners, students, and the public with proven counterspeech methods like debunking, pre-bunking, amplifying alternative viewpoints, and fostering empathy to combat hate speech and disinformation.

We are also working with researchers to create a “prosocial media” ecosystem—one that treats users as citizens capable of democratic engagement, not just data points to be mined or manipulated. Inspired by approaches used in Taiwan and community fact-checking models, this vision reimagines platforms around inclusive dialogue and collective problem-solving rather than outrage and division.

By partnering with Atlas Network, we are able to connect with classical liberal organizations in more than 100 countries that want to do something about the decline of free expression amidst war and widespread democratic backsliding. We look forward to working alongside fellow think tanks and civil society organizations to push back against anti-speech policies and to create environments where the right to free speech is valued and respected.

Across all these efforts, our goal remains clear: to restore a resilient, principled, and global culture of free speech in the digital age. That starts with understanding the threats—and arming those who care about freedom with the facts they need to defend it.

Jacob Mchangama is the executive director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a senior fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.