Clear and Present Danger - A history of free speech

“Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal” read a recent Atlantic article, that stated that “governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”  But is this conclusion the only one available from the fallout of the coronavirus crisis? Or are there other ways to ensure a mature and free internet? Here to discuss the issue is two of the biggest experts on the subject, Daphne Keller and Kate Klonick. 

Since the coronavirus became a pandemic, governments around the world have adopted a wide range of measures affecting basic human rights. This includes many of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe all of whom are legally bound by the European Convention on Human Rights. To discuss the implications for freedom of expression is none other than the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, who previously served as the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.

The Coronavirus has disrupted life as we know it. And the Internet overflows with torrents of data, news and updates about the ongoing crisis. But in parallel with the corona pandemic, WHO has warned of an “infodemic” of mis- and disinformation spreading through social media and messaging apps. With me to discuss how Facebook is navigating this unprecedented situation is Monika Bickert, who is the Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook with responsibility for content moderation.”

In this episode we will explore: How the Communist East and the Capitalist West clashed over the limits of free speech when drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. How the Helsinki Final Act contributed to the fall of Communism.

Weimar Germany was deeply conflicted about the value of free speech. On the one hand, freedom of expression was constitutionally protected. On the other hand, the constitution allowed censorship of cinema and “trash and filth” in literature. When the Nazis finally assumed power, they not only used terror and violence, but also turned the laws and principles supposed to protect the democratic order in to weapons against democracy, paving the way for totalitarianism, war, and genocide.

In this first of a two-part episode on totalitarianism in Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, we will focus on the rise of communism and Italian fascism and the effects of these ideologies on free expression. Hopefully this journey into the darkest of pasts will help shed light on how to grapple with one of democracy’s eternal and inevitable dilemmas: What should be the limits of free speech?  

In this episode, we discuss the history of mass surveillance and its consequences for freedom of expression and information. With me is Andreas Marklund who is the head of research at the ENIGMA Museum of Communication, in Copenhagen.

In this conversation, professor Thomas Healy explains how Wendell Holmes changed his mind on free speech and laid the foundation for the current strong legal protection of the First Amendment. Thomas Healy is a professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law and the author of the award-winning book “The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind--And Changed the History of Free Speech in America”. 

In this episode, we´ll see how the British colonizers took on the burden of civilizing the world and ensuring that the sun would never set on press freedom. But both British and French colonial authorities struggled to reconcile their commitment to liberalism with a colonial empire.

The 18th century ended with free speech in full retreat. With the French Revolution, the call for Enlightenment Now! was no longer seen as the harbinger of humanity´s inevitable march towards progress. In this episode we will see how European rulers weaved an intricate web of censorship and repression across the continent.

In this special edition of Clear And Present Danger we leave the past and jump into the present for a discussion on how international human rights standards are relevant to the burning question of where to draw the limits of free speech online".

In this episode we’ll see how governments in the late 18th century reacted to a different kind of terror: the spread of revolutionary ideas and practice that shook the established order to the ground, including the actual Terror unleashed after the French Revolution spiraled out of control.

In this conversation, French Revolution expert Charles Walton sheds light on the evolution of press freedom and suppression during the Revolution. Walton is the director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre at the University of Warwick in the U.K., has taught at both Yale University and Paris’ Sciences Po, and is the author of the prize-winning book, “Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech.”

When Paris became the capital of the High-Enlightenment around the mid-eighteenth century, the Old Regime monarchy created a Maginot Line of overlapping pre- and post-publication censorship. This system was intended to ensure that good books were encouraged and privileged while bad books that attacked the monarchy and Catholic orthodoxy or morals were kept out of circulation or suppressed.

In the 1760s and 1770s, Sweden and Denmark-Norway shortly became the epicenter of press freedom protections in Enlightenment Europe.  But how did Sweden and Denmark-Norway become trailblazers of press freedom, if only for the briefest of time?