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The War on Free Speech
Censorship's Global Rise
Jacob Mchangama
The roots of free speech are ancient, deep, and sprawling. The

Athenian statesman Pericles extolled the democratic values of

open debate and tolerance of social dissent in 431 BC. In the
ninth century, the irreverent freethinker Ibn al-Rawandi used the fer-
tile intellectual climate of the Abbasid caliphate to question prophecy
and holy books. In 1582, the Dutchman Dirck Coornhert insisted that
it was "tyrannical to .. . forbid good books in order to squelch the
truth." The first legal protection of press freedom was instituted in
Sweden in 1766. In 1770, Denmark became the first state in the world
to abolish any and all censorship.
Today, people in developed democracies take for granted that
free speech is a fundamental right. That concept, however, would
never have taken root if not for the work of trailblazers who were
vilified and persecuted for ideas that many of their contemporaries
considered radical and dangerous. They include the seventeenth-
century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who argued that
"in a free state everyone is at liberty to think as he pleases, and to
say what he thinks"; the so-called Levellers of seventeenth-century
England, for whom free and equal speech was a precondition for
egalitarian democracy; the French feminist Olympe de Gouges, who
wrote in 1791 that "a woman has the right to be guillotined; she
should also have the right to debate"; and the American abolitionist
Frederick Douglass, who saw free speech as a weapon against slavery
and thought that "the right of speech is a very precious one, espe-
cially to the oppressed."

JACOB MCHANGAMA is Founder and Director of Justitia, a Copenhagen-based think

tank that focuses on human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law. He is the author
of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), from which
this essay is adapted.

March/April 2022 117

Jacob McI'angama

If these pioneers were alive today, they would no doubt see the twenty-
first century as an unprecedented golden age of free speech. They would
marvel at what people in much of the world can freely and immediately
discuss, across time zones and borders, with no Index Librorum Prohibito-
rum (Index of Forbidden Books) to censor blasphemy, no Star Chamber
to punish sedition, no Committee of Public Safety to guillotine political
heretics, and no lynch mobs to attack abolitionists. At a global level, the
principle of free speech has been transformed into an international hu-
man rights norm, and its practice has been aided by advances in com-
munications technology unimaginable to the early modern mind.
Given the epic struggles and enormous sacrifices that led to this
happy outcome, there is indeed much to celebrate about the current
condition of free expression. But despite the unprecedented ubiquity
of speech and information today, the golden age is coming to an end.
Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession.
According to V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy), a research institute
that analyzes global democracy, 2020 saw substantial declines in the
respect for freedom of expression in 32 countries; in the year before
that, censorship intensified in a record-breaking 37 countries. These
developments had terrible consequences for the media and reporters.
The Committee to Protect Journalists documented the imprisonment
of 1,010 individual journalists between 2011 and 2020, an alarming 78
percent increase from the previous decade.
In some countries, the free-speech recession looks more like a depres-
sion. In India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has
relied heavily on the type of colonial-era laws against sedition and en-
mity that the British once used to convict Mahatma Gandhi and other
Indian nationalists. Modi has used those laws to silence environmental
activists, politicians, journalists, academics, and minorities-in stark
contrast to Gandhi's passionate defense of free speech, which he consid-
ered "absolutely necessary for a man to breathe the oxygen of liberty."
Free speech is faring even worse in Hong Kong, where the Chi-
nese Communist Party has completed a striking transformation
of the city since cracking down on pro-democracy protests in
2019. What had been a small oasis of free expression, with a vi-
brant civil society and a critical press, is now a barren desert
where democracy activists, academics, and independent media
are punished with draconian laws against what the ccp deems ter-
rorism, secession, or sedition.

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 The War on Free Speech

Freedom of speech and the media have also been targeted in the EU
member states of Hungary and Poland, where illiberal governments
view media pluralism and minority voices as a threat rather than a
strength. In both places, right-wing leaders have put in place laws
aimed at ensuring de facto dominance by government-friendly media
outlets and reducing the visibility of LGBTQ people.
But brutal repression in authoritarian states and creeping censor-
ship in illiberal democracies only partly explain why free speech is in
retreat. Liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight
to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-
speech recession. In the wealthy, established democracies of Europe
and North America, elites in political, academic, and media institu-
tions that once cherished free expression as the lifeblood of democracy
now worry that "free speech is killing us," as the title of a 2019 New
York Times op-ed by the writer Andrew Marantz put it. Many now
point to unmediated disinformation and hateful speech on the Inter-
net as evidence that free speech is being weaponized against democ-
racy itself. Meanwhile, the growing strength and geopolitical clout of
authoritarian and illiberal regimes have led to brutal limits on freedom
of expression in many developing and middle-income countries that
not long ago seemed poised to become freer, more open societies.
It is true that freedom of speech can be exploited to amplify divi-
sion, sow distrust, and inflict serious harm. And the right to free ex-
pression is not absolute; laws properly prohibit threats and incitement
to violence, for example. But the view that today's fierce challenges to
democratic institutions and values can be overcome by rolling back
free speech is deeply misguided. Laws and norms protecting free
speech still constitute "the great bulwark of liberty," as the British es-
sayist Thomas Gordon wrote in 1721. If not maintained, however, a
bulwark can break, and without free speech, the future will be less free,
democratic, and equal-and more ignorant, autocratic, and oppressive.
Rather than abandon this most essential right, democracies should re-
new their commitment to free speech and use it to further liberal dem-
ocratic ideals and counter authoritarian advances.

SAY ANYTHING
Europe is the laboratory where the principle of free speech was first
developed and experimented with in a systematic fashion. Over
time, different rulers tinkered with different combinations of free-

March/April 2022 119

Jacob Mchangama

dom and restriction. So far in the twenty-first century, more restric-

tions than freedoms have been added to the mix.
Since 2008, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democ-
racy Index, western European countries have experienced a sharp de-
cline in civil liberties as "infringements of free speech . . . have
increased." In recent years, both the European Commission and the
governments of Austria, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom
have pursued what the German political scientist Karl Loewenstein
termed "militant democracy": the idea that democracies must deny ba-
sic democratic freedoms to those who reject basic democratic values.
France has adopted a law prohibiting the online "manipulation of infor-
mation" during elections. French President Emmanuel Macron's gov-
ernment has also issued decrees banning the right-wing anti-immigrant
organization Generation Identitaire (citing alleged hate speech) and the
antidiscrimination group the Collective Against Islamophobia in France
(citing what was considered the group's defense of terrorism and anti-
Semitism). Even criticizing Macron himself is risky these days. Last
September, a man was fined more than $11,000 for depicting Macron
as Adolf Hitler on billboards protesting France's COVID-19 policies.
In 2020, Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, coordinated a
crackdown on online hate speech in seven member countries. Among
them was Germany, where police searched more than 80 houses, seiz-
ing smartphones and laptops, and questioned almost 100 suspects
about hateful posts that included "insulting a female politician."
Denmark, along with its Scandinavian neighbors, ranks as one of
the world's most open democracies, with a long tradition of tolerating
even totalitarian ideas. But during the past decade, Danish govern-
ments on both the left and the right have restricted free speech by
toughening libel laws, increasing the punishment for insulting public
officials and politicians, instituting a de facto ban on wearing veils that
fully cover one's face in public, adopting laws punishing religious "hate
preachers" at home and banning foreign ones from entering the coun-
try, expanding the scope of laws against hate speech, and presenting a
draft bill requiring social media platforms to remove any illegal con-
tent within 24 hours of receiving a complaint.
In the United States, the legal protections afforded by the First
Amendment remain strong. But for many Americans, the underlying
ideal of what some First Amendment scholars have termed "free
speech exceptionalism" has lost its appeal. As an abstract principle,

120 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

 The War on Free Speech

Americans continue to support free speech. In practice, however, that

support frequently collapses along unforgiving tribalistic and identi-
tarian lines. Despite American liberalism's tenet that free speech is
necessary to protect historically persecuted minorities against out-
breaks of majoritarian intolerance, this civil libertarian ideal no longer
persuades a new generation of progressives who want to purge an ever-
broadening collection of ideas and views they deem racist, sexist, or
anti-LGBTQ from universities, media outlets, and cultural institutions.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education documented more
than 500 attempts between 2015 and 2021 to professionally sanction
scholars for engaging in constitutionally protected forms of speech.
Over two-thirds of the scholars targeted for speech involving race or
gender faced investigations, suspension, censorship, demotion, or ter-
mination. Many of those cases stemmed from pedagogically justifiable
uses of offensive language. Last year, for example, the University of
Illinois law professor Jason Kilborn was suspended after a student
complained about an exam question that referenced racial and misogy-
nistic slurs-even though the exam presented only the first letter of
each term, with asterisks replacing the rest of the word.
This new American skepticism of free speech is hardly consigned to
the political left. As president, Donald Trump attacked the media as
"the true Enemy of the people," proposed tightening libel laws, and
advocated punishing people who burn the American flag, an act pro-
tected by the First Amendment. Consequently, according to polls
conducted by YouGov during Trump's presidency, a plurality of Re-
publicans supported giving courts the power to shut down media out-
lets for inaccurate or biased news stories and stripping flag burners of
U.S. citizenship. Despite professing concern for free speech, conser-
vatives have also responded to the rise of so-called identity politics
and what they decry as "cancel culture" with illiberal laws prohibiting
the discussion of certain conceptions of and theories about race, gen-
der, and even history in educational settings.
On occasion, the assault on free speech has become a bipartisan af-
fair. Several states and a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate have
adopted or promoted laws punishing businesses for supporting boy-
cotts of Israel and Israeli settlements, despite federal court rulings
that the right to boycott to influence political change is protected by
the First Amendment. Many Democrats and Republicans have also
found common ground on the idea of stripping social media platforms

March/April 2022 121

Jacob Mchangama

of the broad legal protections they enjoy when it comes to user-generated

content-although the liberal and conservative justifications for that
proposed step differ greatly. Democrats want to rein in disinformation
and hate speech, whereas Republicans oppose Big Tech because of
what they see as Silicon Valley's anticonservative bias. But the com-
bined force of this enmity raises serious questions about the long-term
prospects for free speech in the United States.

EGALITARIAN OR ELITIST?
Perhaps nowhere has the erosion of free speech been more apparent than
on the Internet. In 1999, one of the primary architects of the World Wide
Web, Tim Berners-Lee, described his vision of a decentralized space un-
fettered by the censorship of "hierarchical classification systems" imposed
by others. In 2020, however, Internet freedom receded for the 11th straight
year according to Freedom House, which attributed the trend to a
"record-breaking crackdown on freedom of expression online." The
techno-optimist's ideal has given way to an Internet aggressively policed
by states and by corporate behemoths that carry out what some have
dubbed "moderation without representation," using opaque algorithms to
define the limits of global debate with little transparency or accountability.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the global expansion
of free speech that the Internet allows would produce harmful unin-
tended consequences. Along with spreading truthful information and
fostering tolerance, a free and open network accessible to billions of
people across the world inevitably disseminates lies and amplifies
hateful rhetoric. It was also predictable that authoritarian regimes
whose hold on power was challenged by the Internet would invest
heavily in reimposing their control of the means of communication.
In the twentieth century, authoritarians and totalitarians of every
stripe turned the press and broadcast media into fine-tuned instru-
ments of propaganda at the same time as they ruthlessly censored and
repressed dissent. Today, authoritarian states-with China leading
the charge-are reverse engineering the technology that was sup-
posed to make it impossible for censorship to silence dissent at home
and sow division and distrust abroad. In 2000, U.S. President Bill
Clinton famously remarked that China's attempts to crack down on
the Internet were "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Some 20
years later, the Jell-O is firmly attached to the wall-and a portrait of
Chinese President Xi Jinping hangs on the nail.

122 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

 The War on Free Speech

History should have made clear that radical developments in com-

munications technology would not entice elites and gatekeepers to
willingly give up their privileges and admit previously voiceless groups
into the public sphere. New communications technology is inevitably
disruptive. Every new advancement-from the printing press to the
Internet-has been opposed by those whose institutional authority is
vulnerable to being undermined by sudden change. In 1525, the great
humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, himself a prodigious writer,
complained that printers "fill the world with pamphlets and books
[that are] foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and sub-
versive." In 1858, The New York Times lamented that communication
via transatlantic telegraph was "superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast
for the truth." In 2006, Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator
from Illinois, praised the Internet as "a neutral platform" that allowed
him to "say what I want without censorship." Social media would later
play an important role in his rise to the presidency. But 14 years later,
after the presidential election of 2020, Obama declared online disin-
formation "the single biggest threat to our democracy."
The fundamental disagreement about free speech among democrats
in the digital age can be boiled down to two opposing understandings.
An egalitarian conception of free speech stresses the importance of pro-
viding everyone with a voice in public affairs regardless of status or edu-
cation. An elitist conception, on the other hand, prefers a public sphere
mediated by institutional gatekeepers who can ensure the "responsible"
diffusion of information and opinion. The clash between these two per-
spectives stretches back to antiquity and originated in the differences
between Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism. In Athens, or-
dinary free male citizens enjoyed a direct voice in political decision-
making and the right to speak frankly in public (the fate of Socrates
notwithstanding). Rome, in contrast, limited free speech to a small elite;
others had to tread carefully, lest they run afoul of laws against licen-
tiousness, which could lead to banishment or execution.

THE DIGITAL CITY

The tension between these egalitarian and elitist ideals has dominated the
history of free speech ever since, even as the mediums have changed and
technology has advanced. Outbreaks of elite panic often reflect real con-
cerns and dilemmas but often result in policies that are likely to worsen
the problems they were intended to solve. Take Germany's Network En-

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Jacob Mchangama

forcement Act (NetzDG), which was put into effect in 2017 and obliges
social media platforms to remove illegal content or face huge fines. The
law has done little to check hatred online but has incentivized Big Tech
platforms to expand their definitions of prohibited speech and extremism
and turbocharge their automated content moderation-resulting in the
deletion of massive amounts of content that was perfectly legal.
The law's most discernible impact, however, may have been to serve
as a blueprint for Internet censorship, providing a veneer of legitimacy
to authoritarian regimes around the globe that have explicitly cited the
German law as an inspiration for their own censorship laws. The law was
a good faith effort to curb online hate speech but has helped spark a
regulatory race to the bottom that undermines freedom of expression as
guaranteed by international human rights standards. Although it would
be misleading to blame Germany for the draconian laws adopted in au-
thoritarian states, those countries' embrace of restrictions resembling
NetzDG should give Germany and other Western democracies pause.
The importance of free speech in the digital space is clear to em-
battled pro-democracy activists in places such as Belarus, Egypt,
Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, and Venezuela, where they depend on
the ability to communicate and organize-and to the regimes of these
countries, which view such activities as an existential threat. And
when liberal democracies pass censorship laws or when Big Tech plat-
forms prohibit certain kinds of speech or bar certain users, they make
it easier for authoritarian regimes to justify their repression of dis-
sent. In this way, democracies and the companies that thrive in them
sometimes unwittingly help entrench regimes that fuel propaganda
and disinformation in those very same democracies.
These conflicting dynamics are playing out in a context in which
there is no clear legitimate authority, shared values, or principles on
which to build a global framework for free speech. This reflects a much
deeper and fundamental disconnect between what the philosopher of
technology L. M. Sacasas has called "the Digital City," where we live
our hyperconnected lives in the Internet era, and "the Analog City,"
where life took place in the industrial era, prior to mass digitization.
Modern humans increasingly inhabit the former while trying to make
sense of its unprecedented informational order according to the prin-
ciples and assumptions of the latter. The result has been a tendency
toward a fragmentation of the public sphere, with plummeting trust in
established sources of information and political institutions.

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 The War on Free Speech

The disruptive effects of switching from the Analog City to the Dig-
ital City are unlikely to run their course anytime soon. The printing
press had been around for 70 years before it caught on and helped launch
the Protestant Reformation. In comparison, the World Wide Web has
been around for only 30 years or so, and Google, Facebook, and Twitter
were founded in 1998, 2004, and 2006, respectively. These may well be
just the early days of the digital age,
with massive disruptions still to come.

-
Over the past two years, a torrent A new generation of
of lies and conspiracy theories have progressives want to purge
taken a toll. They have made it harder

.
to contain a deadly pandemic. And ideas they deem racist,
they led millions to reject the legiti- sexist, or anti-LGBTQ.
macy of a presidential election in the --- --
world's most powerful democracy, culminating in the first violent at-
tack on the peaceful transfer of power ever witnessed in the United
States. If these pathologies are but a harbinger of things to come in the
Digital City, no wonder many still cling to the relative certainty and
informational structure of the Analog City. It might be tempting to
simply condemn huge swaths of cyberspace as irreparably corrupt and
close them off, much as the Ottoman emperors in the sixteenth century
shunned the printing press in a bid to avoid the political chaos and re-
ligious conflict that had unsettled Europe in part because of changes
ushered in by the freer spread of information. That choice might have
seemed prudent at the time; now, however, it looks like a costly miscal-
culation, as the compound knowledge and ideas spread by the printing
press eventually helped Europe lay the foundation for global domi-
nance, even as religious wars were raging across the continent. Modern
democracies are unlikely to err so badly. But when Macron insists that
in democracies, the "Internet is much better used by those on the
extremes," and when Obama cautions that online disinformation
poses "the single biggest threat" to democracy, they are inflating the
threat and courting overreaction.
There is no denying that the backlash against social media has had
consequences. Facebook and Twitter originally displayed a strong civil
libertarian impulse inspired by First Amendment ideals. As late as
2012, Twitter only half-jokingly described itself as "the free speech
wing of the free speech party." But as the scrutiny grew more intense
and the calls for more content removal and regulation grew ever louder,

March/April 2022 125

Jacob Mchangama

the platforms changed their tune and started emphasizing the values
of "safety" and preventing "harm." In a 2017 hearing before a hostile
British Parliament, a Twitter vice president waved the white flag and
announced that the platform was ditching its "John Stuart Mill-style
philosophy." And in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief execu-
tive, called for stronger regulation of
S ------- ---- the Internet, knowing full well that
Instead of sacrificing few other platforms would be able to
free speech, democracies spend as many resources on content
moderation as Facebook does.
must rediscover its In recent years, platforms such as
enormous potential. Facebook and Twitter have altered
-- *---------- ---- their terms of service in ways that
have led to the banning of more content and broader categories of
speech. Facebook deleted 26.9 million pieces of content for alleg-
edly violating its standards on hate speech in the last quarter of
2020. That is nearly 17 times the 1.6 million deletions of alleged
hate speech in the last quarter of 2017. Twitter and YouTube also
removed record levels of content in 2020. Those caught in the drag-
net are not all neo-Nazis or violent jihadis; others whose content
has been purged include activists documenting war crimes in Syria,
racial and sexual minorities using slurs to expose bigotry, and Rus-
sians critical of President Vladimir Putin. No government in his-
tory has ever been able to exert such extensive control over what
people all over the world are saying, writing, reading, watching, lis-
tening to, and sharing with others.
Ultimately, any society that becomes dependent on the central-
ized control of information and opinion will be neither free nor
vibrant. Past attempts to rid the public sphere of ideas that au-
thorities or elites considered extreme or harmful have tended to
exclude the poor and the propertyless, foreigners, women, and re-
ligious, racial, ethnic, national, and sexual minorities. Until rela-
tively recently in historical terms, those in power have deemed
people in these categories too credulous, fickle, immoral, ignorant,
or dangerous to have a voice in public affairs.
Liberal democracies must come to terms with the fact that in the
Digital City, citizens and institutions cannot be shielded from hos-
tile propaganda, hateful content; or disinformation without compro-
mising their egalitarian and liberal values. Whatever fundamental

126 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

 The War on Free Speech

reforms governments must pursue to ensure that humans can thrive,

trust one another, and flourish in the Digital City, a robust commit-
ment to free speech should be recognized as a necessary part of the
solution rather than an outdated ideal to be discarded.

THE POWER OF SPEECH

Rather than trying to save democracy by sacrificing free speech, de-
mocracies must rediscover its enormous potential. Recent history
provides both inspiration for how they can do so and stark warnings
about the dangers of letting authoritarian states win the fight on
where to draw redlines. When the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR) and the legally binding International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (IccPR) were negotiated at the UN in the
years following World War II, liberal democracies and the Soviet bloc
fought bitterly about the limits of free speech. The Soviets sought to
include an obligation to ban hate speech in accordance with Article
123 of Joseph Stalin's 1936 constitution, which prohibited any "advo-
cacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt."
In the face of this pressure, Eleanor Roosevelt, the first chair of
what was then the UN Commission on Human Rights, emerged as an
eloquent defender of free-speech maximalism. She warned that the
Soviet proposals "would be extremely dangerous" and were likely to be
"exploited by totalitarian States." Democracies managed to defeat
hate-speech bans in the UDHR, but ultimately, the Soviet agenda won
the day: Article 20 of the ICCPR obliges states to prohibit specific forms
of incitement to hatred. Predictably, Soviet-backed communist states
used laws against hate speech and incitement as part of their arsenal
against dissent and political enemies at home, a tactic still in use by
authoritarian states. But the initial fight at the UN over the limits of
free speech in international human rights law was only the first of sev-
eral rounds that would be fought over the coming decades.
In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by 35 countries under the
auspices of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The act's primary ambition was to ease Cold War tensions, but Western
democracies persuaded the Soviet bloc to accept the inclusion of human
rights provisions. The communist regimes objected to the human rights
language during the lengthy negotiations. They were already fighting
an uphill battle to jam the radio signals of Western radio stations that
broadcast uncensored news into the homes of millions of people behind

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Jacob Mchangama

the Iron Curtain. In 1972, using rhetoric eerily similar to that now used
by many democratic leaders, Soviet officials had declared that they
would never tolerate "the dissemination of . .. racism, fascism, the cult
of violence, hostility among peoples and false slanderous propaganda."
Nevertheless, the Soviet bloc swallowed the human rights concessions,
which they viewed as little more than empty rhetoric.
But through newspaper reports, word of mouth, samizdat publica-
tions, and Western radio broadcasts, people in Eastern Europe quickly
learned about the new rights that their governments had solemnly prom-
ised to respect. And among the rights guaranteed by the Helsinki Final
Act, perhaps none was more important than freedom of expression. The
principle and practice of free speech were used by Western democracies
and burgeoning human rights organizations to empower and amplify the
protests of Soviet-bloc dissidents. The famous Charter 77 manifesto,
authored in 1977 by an eclectic mix of Czechoslovak dissidents-includ-
ing Vaclav Havel, the country's future leader-complained that "the
right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by Article 19 of
the ICCPR, is in our case purely illusory." In 1990, after Czechoslovakia's
Velvet Revolution, Havel, who had become president, gave a trium-
phant speech to the U.S. Congress:
When [Communist authorities] arrested me . . . , I was living in a
country ruled by the most conservative communist government in
Europe, and our society slumbered beneath the pall of a totalitarian
system. Today, less than four months later, I'm speaking to you as the
representative of a country that has set out on the road to democracy,
a country where there is complete freedom of speech.

Likewise, Lech Walesa, the trade union leader who went on to serve
as the president of Poland in the post-Cold War period, recalled that
in his successful struggle to topple communism, "one of the central
freedoms at stake was freedom of expression." Walesa noted that "with-
out this basic freedom, human life becomes meaningless; and once the
truth of this hit me, it became part of my whole way of thinking."
Later, free speech also contributed to ending apartheid in South Af-
rica, where censorship and repression had been used to maintain white
supremacy. In 1994, shortly before winning the country's first free pres-
idential election, Nelson Mandela gave a speech in which he credited
the international media for shining a global spotlight on the atrocities
committed by the apartheid regime. He then promised to abolish

128 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

 The War on Free Speech

apartheid-era laws limiting free expression, a right that he pledged

would constitute one of the "core values" of South African democracy.
More recently, in 2011, the Obama administration notched a rare
but important win amid the current era's free-speech recession. For
more than a decade, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had mo-
bilized majorities at the UN General Assembly and the UN Human
Rights Council to support resolutions against "the defamation of reli-
gion." The oic's campaign was an attempt to pass a legally binding ban
on religious blasphemy at the UN-a step that would have effectively
extended the writ of regimes in Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia that
severely punish satire, criticism, and irreverent discussions of Islam. In
response, the United States, with assistance from a number of Euro-
pean democracies, launched a multilateral global offensive to stop the
oic's effort. The strategy worked and not only defended but also ex-
panded existing free-speech norms, leading to the adoption of a resolu-
tion that affirmed that human rights law protects people, not religions
or ideologies. Although the resolution condemned advocacy of incite-
ment to hatred, it called on the criminalization only of "incitement to
imminent violence based on religion or belief." Moreover, the resolu-
tion helped remedy the original sin of international human rights law
by narrowing the obligation to prohibit incitement to hatred inserted
in the ICCPR at the behest of the Soviet Union back in the 1960s.

THE TALKING CURE

These precedents provide democracies with a guide for how to promote
the fundamental value of free speech. Instead of launching global initia-
tives limiting that freedom, democracies should join forces to expand the
shrinking spaces for dissent and civil society around the globe. One way
to do so is through concerted efforts to expose and condemn censorship
and repression and to offer civil society organizations and dissidents
technical support that can amplify dissent and circumvent repressive
measures. Democracies must be vigilant about protecting norms within
international institutions and preventing authoritarian states from tak-
ing advantage of elite panic to dilute hard-won speech protections.
Democracies should also push for global Big Tech platforms to vol-
untarily adopt robust human rights standards to help guide and inform
their content moderation policies and practices. This would solidify
the sprawling and ever-changing terms of service that previously set
the bar significantly lower than what follows from human rights norms

March/April 2022 129

Jacob Mchangama

and constitutional freedoms in liberal democracies. Such a move would

also help online platforms resist the pressure to act as privately out-
sourced censors of dissent in countries where social media may be the
only way for citizens to circumvent official censorship and propaganda.
In addition to direct government action, civil society and technology
companies can also contribute to the promotion and protection of free
speech. A cottage industry has sprung up to map, analyze, and counter
disinformation and propaganda-a far healthier approach than attempts
to ban harmful speech. Likewise, several studies suggest that organized
campaigns of strategic "counterspeech" can provide an antidote to on-
line hate speech, which frequently targets minority groups. For example,
the Swedish online community #jagarhir (#iamhere) has tens of thou-
sands of members who respond to hateful posts on social media-an
approach that has been copied by groups in many other countries.
Innovative journalists, activists, and collectives such as Bellingcat are
also using open-source intelligence and data to expose the criminal
deeds and human rights violations of authoritarian states. Not even
China can avoid such scrutiny: unlike the suffering of victims in the
Soviet Union's gulag, to which the world was mostly oblivious, the hor-
rific conditions in Chinas network of "reeducation camps" in the west-
ern region of Xinjiang have been exposed by journalists, activists, and
victims using smartphones, social media, satellites, and messaging apps.
The free-speech recession must be resisted by people around the
world who have benefited from the revolutionary acts and sacrifices of
the millions who came before them and fought for the cherished right
to speak one's mind. It is up to those who already enjoy that right to
defend the tolerance of heretical ideas, limit the reach of disinforma-
tion, agree to disagree without resorting to harassment or hate, and
treat free speech as a principle to be upheld universally rather than a
prop to be selectively invoked for narrow, tribalistic point-scoring. As
George Orwell put it in 1945: "If large numbers of people are inter-
ested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if
the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minori-
ties will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them." Free speech
is still an experiment, and in the digital age, no one can guarantee the
outcome of providing global platforms to billions of people. But the
experiment is noble-and worth continuing.;

130 FOREIGN AFFAIRS