This essay was originally published by Persuasion on Jan. 28, 2025.

On Oct. 17, 1961, tens of thousands of Algerians marched through the streets of Paris in peaceful defiance of a discriminatory curfew imposed by the French state. Police opened fire, beat protesters, arrested them en masse — and, in some cases, threw people into the Seine, where they drowned. Historians later called it “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history.” At least 48 — but possibly hundreds — were killed.

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Yet for decades, the official story minimized the violence. The death toll, it was claimed, was three. Police had acted to defend themselves. The protesters were terrorists.

The French state actively buried the truth. Records were falsified. Evidence suppressed. Investigations blocked. Publications seized. The paper trail was shaped to match the story.

In 1999, the French Public Prosecutor’s Office concluded that a massacre had taken place, but only in 2012 did President Hollande acknowledge it on behalf of the French Republic. This is the danger of a public sphere without a distributed capacity to challenge official accounts in real time: It is difficult to imagine that the events of Oct. 17 could have been hidden for so long if thousands of protesters and bystanders had carried smartphones, livestreamed the crackdown, and uploaded footage as the bodies hit the water.

Paris 1961 is a historical warning. Minneapolis 2026 is its modern counterpoint.

Within hours of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents on Jan. 24, top officials attempted to shape the narrative. They placed the blame squarely on the victim, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claiming that Pretti “approached” ICE officers with a gun and was killed after he “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him. White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller called Pretti “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”

In other words, Pretti supposedly posed a threat and paid the price.

But something happened that couldn’t have happened in France in 1961. As bystander footage spread across social media, the official narrative began to collapse. Videos appeared to show a cellphone in one of Pretti’s hands and no gun in the other. Officers also appeared to remove his holstered gun — legally carried — before he was shot several times. It then emerged that Pretti was an ICU nurse with no criminal record — hardly the prototype of a terrorist.

The official account was clearly at odds with the best available evidence. Four days after the shooting, the Trump administration is already scrambling to save face, cast blame, and “de-escalate” the ICE presence in Minnesota.

The current obsession with misinformation tends to focus on the public: online mobs, foreign influencers, flaming trolls. But history suggests a more inconvenient truth: in times of crisis, disinformation often comes from above. Governments, including democratic ones, have powerful incentives to shape information. When a state agent shoots a citizen, the response is rarely “Let’s expose ourselves to transparency.” It is often the opposite: to control the narrative, limit scrutiny, discourage dissent, and frame the event in morally legitimizing terms.

What should our response look like? The Pretti case offered an answer — not only through the videos, but through something else that happened almost simultaneously: the public correction of powerful figures, at scale. Within hours the statements by Miller, Noem, and Patel — and even the official @DHSgov account — had all received Community Notes on X, a platform that, ironically, has become increasingly central to the populist right and is owned by Trump ally Elon Musk.

This is where social media performs a civic function.

When platforms label content as “false” in a top-down fashion, many users interpret it as bias — “truth policing” by corporate gatekeepers in cahoots with governments. But the Community Notes system is different. It is crowdsourced, asking volunteers to add context and sources to misleading posts. An open-source algorithm decides which notes become visible, and, crucially, prioritizes notes that gain support from users with different political perspectives. The point is not unanimity — it’s cross-ideological agreement sufficient to clear a threshold of credibility.

This is what makes bottom-up correction hard to dismiss as partisan censorship. It involves a distributed group of users reaching a form of consensus, often by pointing to credible reporting. It can create a positive feedback loop: journalism supplies verifiable facts; the crowd amplifies and contextualizes them; the overall information environment becomes more resilient.

Early research into the impact of crowdsourcing is promising. Studies have found high accuracy rates for Community Notes in specific domains like COVID-19 content, and a significant share of notes cite high-quality sources.

More broadly, crowdsourced fact checking reflects an important principle: when trust in elite institutions collapses, a purely expert-driven model may fail or even backfire. Politically diverse crowds can sometimes do what “authoritative” gatekeepers cannot: persuade skeptics that a correction is legitimate.

Crowdsourcing is not a silver bullet. The search for a single, decisive fix for disinformation is a “modern mirage” that often serves as a pretext for giving authorities new powers they will inevitably abuse. But the promise of crowdsourcing suggests we should bet on pluralism: multiple, overlapping checks that strengthen the public’s ability to verify claims without empowering any single institution — especially the state — to control the boundaries of permissible speech. The mainstreaming of crowdsourced fact-checking across social media platforms should function as a disincentive to brazen lying by politicians and political influencers.

In Paris in 1961, the state could suppress evidence, control archives, intimidate media, and deflect until public attention faded. In Minneapolis in 2026, video evidence traveled faster than the official storyline — and distributed networks of verification made it harder for powerful figures to rewrite reality without pushback.

This is what a free society should aim for: not a perfect public sphere without falsehoods (which has never existed), but a public sphere with enough openness, transparency, and decentralized checking power to ensure that lies — especially from the top — cannot become the permanent record.

In 1649, a group of English radicals sent a petition to the House of Commons. In it, they lamented the licensing of printing — which allowed the government to “pre-censor” books and pamphlets — as well as the harsh punishments for publishing unlicensed or “scandalous” ones.

The radicals warned that this kind of censorship would usher in a tyranny, and they insisted that it “seems altogether inconsistent with the good of the Commonwealth, and expresly [sic] opposite and dangerous to the liberties of the people.”

These radicals, known as the Levellers, paid dearly for their defiance. Their leaders were repeatedly imprisoned, and their demands for near-universal male suffrage, religious freedom, and unrestricted speech were crushed.

Yet their bold vision left a legacy. Later champions of free expression, from the authors of Cato’s Letters to John Wilkes, carried their arguments forward. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic, circulated in pamphlets at revolutionary speed, and ultimately found their way into state constitutions and the First Amendment.

Centuries later, it seems Britain is in dire need of a new generation of Levellers.

In April, The Times reported that more than 30 people a day were being arrested for various online offenses, equating to 12,000 arrests a year, according to The Telegraph. In June, Hamit Coskun was fined £240 for a religiously aggravated public order offence after burning a Quran and shouting profanities against Islam outside the Turkish consulate in London — an act of protest against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian Islamism.

In March, six girls at a Quaker meeting house in London were arrested for “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” for holding a meeting about a potential non-violent protest. They were part of a group called Youth Demand, which had been carrying out acts of civil disobedience as part of their “fight to end genocide.” Thirty officers were involved in the arrest, which was part of a larger campaign of raids for similar offenses that took place across the city that day.

Nearly 900 people were arrested in London over the weekend for protesting against the government’s ban on the advocacy group Palestine Action under an anti-terrorism law, which in the U.S. would be similar to the Trump administration declaring Students for Justice in Palestine a terrorist organization. Expressing support for a proscribed organization is punishable with up to 14 years in prison.

And Irish comedian Graham Linehan was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport last week. Linehan, a vocal critic of gender self-identification, rejects the idea that biological sex can be changed and opposes access for biological males to female-only spaces. His alleged crime apparently consisted of three tweets from April, one of which read:

The tweets were undoubtedly harsh and deeply offensive to many transgender people, who see Linehan’s stance as a denial of their very identity. Yet tolerating speech that offends our most cherished beliefs is the price of any meaningful conception of free expression, whether in law or in culture.

Even in the U.S., where legal speech protections are stronger than in the U.K., (imminent) incitement to violence can be restricted. However, a provocative tweet from more than four months ago suggesting that someone “punch” others in a hypothetical situation does not meet any meaningful threshold of incitement (imminent or not) — no more than do abstract exhortations to “punch Nazis” or, conversely, to attack “TERFs,” as some trans activists have urged.

All told, it is difficult to escape the depressing conclusion that the home of the Levellers, Cato’s Letters, John Wilkes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell has taken a deeply troubling turn away from the robust tradition of free speech these seminal figures argued so eloquently for.

With every arrest, the British must remind themselves: Rights lost are not easily regained. And for Americans looking across the pond in horror, a warning: It can happen here, too.

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Generative AI is changing the way we learn, think, discover, and create. Researchers at UC San Diego are using generative AI technology to accelerate climate modeling. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have developed a chatbot that can help diagnose cancers. In Belarus, Venezuela, and Russia, political dissidents and embattled journalists have created AI tools to bypass censorship.

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Despite these benefits, a recent global survey from The Future of Free Speech, a think tank where I am the executive director, finds that people around the world support strict guardrails — whether imposed by companies or governments — on the types of content that AI can create.

These findings were part of a broader survey that ranked 33 countries on overall support for free speech, including on controversial but legal topics. In every country, even high-scoring ones, fewer than half supported AI generating content that, for instance, might offend religious beliefs or insult the national flag — speech that would be protected in most democracies. While some people might find these topics beyond reproach, the ability to question these orthodoxies is a fundamental freedom that underpins free and open societies.

This tension reflects two competing approaches for how societies should harness AI’s power. The first, “User Empowerment,” sees generative AI as a powerful but neutral tool. Harm lies not in the tool itself, but in how it’s used and by whom. This approach affirms that free expression includes not just the right to speak, but the right to access information across borders and media — a collective good essential to informed choice and democratic life. Laws should prohibit using AI to commit fraud or harassment, not ban AI from discussing controversial political topics.

The second, “Preemptive Safetyism,” treats some speech as inherently harmful and seeks to block it before it’s even created. While this instinct may seem appealing given the potential for using AI to supercharge harm production, it risks turning AI into a tool of censorship and control, especially in the hands of powerful corporate or political actors.

As AI becomes an integrated operating system in our everyday life, it is critical that we not cut off access to ideas and information that may challenge us. Otherwise, we risk limiting human creativity and stifling scientific discovery.

Concerns over AI moderation

In 2024, The Future of Free Speech analyzed the policies of six major chatbots and tested 268 prompts to see how they handled controversial but legal topics, such as the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports and the “lab-leak” theory. We found that chatbots refused to generate content for more than 40% of prompts. This year, we repeated our tests and found that refusal rates dropped significantly to about 25% of the time.

Despite these positive developments, our survey’s findings indicate that people are comfortable with companies and governments erecting strict guardrails on what their AI chatbots can generate, which may result in large-scale government-mandated corporate control of users’ access to information and ideas.

Overwhelming opposition to political deepfakes

Unsurprisingly, the category of AI content that received the lowest support across the board in our survey was deepfakes of politicians. No more than 38% of respondents in any country expressed approval of political deepfakes. This finding aligns with a surge of legislative activity in both the U.S. and abroad as policymakers rush to regulate the use of AI deepfakes in elections.

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At least 40 U.S. states introduced deepfake-related bills in the 2024 legislative session alone, with more than 50 bills already enacted. China, the EU, and others are all scrambling to pass laws requiring the detection, disclosure, and/or removal of deepfakes. Europe’s AI Act requires platforms to mitigate nebulous and ill-defined “systemic risks to society,” which could lead companies to preemptively remove lawful but controversial speech like deepfakes critical of politicians.

Although deepfakes can have real-world consequences, First Amendment advocates who have challenged deepfake regulations in the U.S. rightly argue that laws targeting political deepfakes open the door for governments to censor lawful dissent, criticism, or satire of candidates, a vital function of the democratic process. This is not a merely speculative risk.

The editor of a far-right German media outlet was sentenced to a seven-month suspended prison sentence for sharing a fake meme of the Interior Minister holding a sign that ironically read, “I hate freedom of speech.” For much of 2024, Google restricted Gemini’s ability to generate factual responses about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after the Indian government accused the company of breaking the law when its chatbot responded that Modi had been “accused of implementing policies some experts characterized as fascist.”

And despite panic over AI-driven disinformation undermining global elections in 2024, studies from Princeton, the EU, and the Alan Turing Institute found no evidence that a wave of deepfakes affected election results in places like the U.S., Europe, or India.

People want regulation but don’t trust regulators

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly six in 10 U.S. adults believed the government would not adequately regulate AI. Our survey confirms these findings on a global scale. In all countries surveyed except Taiwan, at least a plurality supported dual regulation by both governments and tech companies.

Indeed, a 2023 Pew survey found that 55% of Americans supported government restrictions on false information online, even if it limited free expression. But a 2024 Axios poll found that more Americans fear misinformation from politicians than from AI, foreign governments, or social media. In other words, the public appears willing to empower those they distrust most with policing online and AI misinformation.

A new FIRE poll, conducted in May 2025, underscores this tension. Although about 47% of respondents said they prioritize protecting free speech in politics, even if that means tolerating some deceptive content, 41% said it’s more important to protect people from misinformation than to protect free speech. Even so, 69% said they were “moderately” to “extremely” concerned that the government might use AI rules to silence criticism of elected officials.

In a democracy, public opinion matters — and The Future of Free Speech survey suggests that people around the world, including in liberal democracies, favor regulating AI to suppress offensive or controversial content. But democracies are not mere megaphones for majorities. They must still safeguard the very freedoms — like the right to access information, question orthodoxy, and challenge those in power — that make self-government possible.

We should avoid Preemptive Safetyism

The dangers of Preemptive Safetyism are most vividly on display in China, where AI tools like DeepSeek must enforce “core socialist values,” avoiding topics like Taiwan, Xinjiang, or Tiananmen, even when released in the West. What looks like a safety net can easily become a dragnet for dissent.

Speech being generated by a machine does not negate the human right to receive it, especially as those algorithms become central to the very search engines, email clients, and word processors that we use as an interface for the exchange of ideas and information in the digital age.

The greatest danger to speech often arises not from what is said, but from the fear of what might be said. An open society cannot thrive if its digital architecture is built to exclude dissent by design.

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This article was originally published in The Dispatch on April 24, 2025.

Two years ago, I moved to the United States to found a think tank devoted to defending global free expression. What better place to launch than America, which is, according to the law professor and First Amendment expert Lee Bollinger, “the most speech protective of any nation on Earth, now or throughout history”?

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Despite being Danish, I’ve always found America’s civil-libertarian free speech tradition more appealing than the Old World’s model, with its vague terms and conditions. For much of my career, I’ve been evangelizing a First Amendment approach to free speech to skeptical Europeans and doubtful Americans, who are often tempted by laws banning “hate speech,” “extremism,” and “disinformation.” That appreciation for the First Amendment is something I share with many foreigners — Germans, Iranians, Russians — who now call America home. For some of us, that tradition has become a kind of secular article of faith — the realization of which not only offers a sense of identity, but also a rite of passage into American ideals. Indeed, many of us noncitizens nodded in agreement in February when Vice President J.D. Vance said that European speech restrictions are “shocking to American ears.”

But the very ideal that so many of us noncitizens cherish as America’s “first freedom” is now being curtailed. The administration is invoking a clause of the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the secretary of state unfettered discretion to deport aliens, including anyone he believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This new scheme has begun with the detaining of foreign students — including visa and green card holders — for allegedly antisemitic speech.

Combating anti-Semitism is an important and legitimate government interest, and both Americans and noncitizens are safer when bigotry is confronted. But for six decades America has prohibited censorship and relied on counterspeech as the main bulwark against hatred, not least because leading Jewish and black civil rights groups have long recognized the danger of giving the government power over speech. Had the administration focused on noncitizens engaged in illegal or seriously disruptive conduct targeting Jewish students — which clearly occurred on some campuses after the October 7 terrorist Hamas attacks — few could have objected.

But it’s now clear that the government is targeting noncitizens for ideas and speech protected by the First Amendment. The most worrying example (so far) is a Turkish student at Tufts University, apparently targeted for co-authoring a student op-ed calling for, among other things, Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel. One report estimates that nearly 300 students from universities across the country have had their visas revoked so far.

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Instead of correcting this overreach, the government has doubled down. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced that it would begin screening the social media posts of aliens “whose posts indicate support for antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity.” Shortly after, the X account of USCIS posted about a “robust social media vetting program” and warned: “EVERYONE should be on notice. If you’re a guest in our country — act like it.” And four days later, White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller promised to deport “anyone who preaches hate for America.” What that means is anybody’s guess — and seems to depend entirely on subjective assessments.

This has created a wave of self-censorship among the millions of noncitizens who live, study, and work in the U.S. Conversations among expats now center on how many have stopped posting political content or canceled travel abroad, fearing they won’t be let back in. Noncitizens in think tanks and public policy roles I have spoken to are using burner phones and keeping immigration lawyers on speed dial. Universities are advising foreign students and faculty not to publicly criticize the U.S. government or officials. Students are complying, even going so far as to ask to have their bylines removed from articles, refraining from peaceful protests and scrubbing their social media accounts. Even more surreal: People, including me, are receiving constant pleas from friends and family to come home, fearing what might happen if we stay. After all, this is America, not Russia.

As a green card holder, I understand why so many foreign students, faculty members, and other legal residents who live in and love this country might prefer to stay silent—after all, they came here for a reason, whether to study, work, or start a life with loved ones. But silence would be a betrayal of the very values that brought many of us here in the first place. In fact, I can think of few things more un-American than having to self-censor out of fear of being targeted by the government.

This isn’t the first time America has targeted foreign dissenters. In 1798, President John Adams signed the Alien Act, giving himself sweeping power to deport any noncitizen from a friendly nation deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” or merely “suspected” of treason or “secret machinations against the government.” In response, James Madison warned the law’s vague language “can never be mistaken for legal rules or certain definitions” and “subvert[ed] the general principles of free government.” Thomas Jefferson called it “a most detestable thing … worthy of the 8th or 9th century.” Their concerns were vindicated when Americans handed Adams’ Federalists a catastrophic defeat in the 1800 election, and the Alien Act expired under Jefferson.

During the Red Scares of the 20th century, waves of government paranoia led to the surveillance, detention, and deportation of “subversive” noncitizens. McCarthyism has been roundly criticized in the decades since, and few have likely imagined that a McCarthy-era statute would not only survive but be revived and aggressively expanded in the 21st century.

The late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens is a more recent testament to the long tolerance of America toward foreign dissent. Before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2007, Hitchens spent decades as a legal resident — and as one of America’s most acerbic public intellectuals. He accused Ronald Reagan of being “a liar and trickster,” called Israel America’s “chosen surrogate” for “dirty work” and “terrorism,” lambasted Bill Clinton as “almost psychopathically deceitful,” and accused the George W. Bush administration of torture and illegal surveillance. If a student can be deported for writing a campus op-ed critical of Israel, any of Hitchens’ views could have been used to justify deporting him.

Those applauding the recent crackdowns should remember how quickly the target can change. An overzealous administration focused on countering “Islamophobia” rather than antisemitism might have barred Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie before they became citizens. The next might decide Douglas Murray crosses the line.

Surely Secretary of State Marco Rubio knows this. In a recent interview, he warned that if Americans are denied entry to or face consequences in Europe for their online speech, it would undermine “one of the pillars of our shared values”—freedom of expression. Yet his own department now targets foreign nationals in the U.S. for the same online speech he was ostensibly protecting.

Had America been known for deporting, rather than welcoming, dissent, I would never have made it my home. That might not have been much of a loss. But consider this: 35 percent of U.S.-affiliated academic Nobel laureates are immigrants, and nearly half of all American unicorn startups have founders born outside the country. How many of these brilliant minds would have chosen the United States if they risked exile for crossing the speech red lines of the moment?

As a European who owes my freedom in life thus far to the America that fought Nazism and defeated communism, I feel a responsibility to speak out when this country strays from its founding ideals. I came to America for its freedom, not just to enjoy it, but to defend it — even if that puts me at risk.

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