free speech

Protesters in many countries may find themselves facing down state forces with extralegal powers and a muzzled press. Sixteen Latin American countries severely restricted their borders in mid-March, creating a physical firewall against the coronavirus that they hope will allow them to avoid the fate of countries such as Italy, Spain, and the United States. …

A number of U.S. civil-rights groups are calling on major advertisers to pull their ads from Facebook to protest what they say is the mammoth social media company’s “repeated failure” to adequately address the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation on its platform. The Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP along with four other groups announced …

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Wednesday called to revoke liability protections for social media companies in a move that could have far-reaching ramifications for the regulation of speech on the internet. “It’s pretty simple: if Twitter and Google and the rest are going to editorialize and censor and act like traditional publishers, they should …

President Trump on Wednesday threatened social-media companies with regulation and even closure over past alleged election interference, a day after Twitter fact-checked two of the president’s tweets, a first for the company. In several tweets on Wednesday morning, the president accused social-media companies of silencing conservatives, as well as interfering in the 2016 election. “Republicans …

In the last lecture, we looked at those arguments that won the debate for free speech. Historically, those arguments were nested in different philosophical contexts, and they were often tailored to audiences hostile in varying degrees to free speech. So let me summarize, in contemporary language, the elements of those arguments that are still with …