A professor in Germany was banned from teaching for 16 months after the domestic intelligence service wrongly classified him as a “right-wing extremist” based solely on guilt by association: www.faz.net/aktuell/poli... German "militant democracy" is on a dangerous path

"Unter anderem soll der umstrittene Tatbestand der Politikerbeleidigung auf Journalisten ausgedehnt werden" Bitte, bitte liebe Zentristen, hört endlich auf mit diesem furchtbaren Quatsch, ihr macht alles nur noch schlimmer www.lto.de/recht/nachri...

wenn sich etwas tatsächlich so verhält, wie einer behauptet, dass es sich verhält, dann „insinuiert“ er eigentlich gar nicht, oder?

📊 The #DSA data access portal is live, and VLOPs/VLOSEs have begun publishing their data catalogues. Trying to collect the links again: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

German “hate speech” laws are already troubling, but their enforcement has become alarmingly disproportionate, unconstitutional, and incompatible with a free society, writes Affiliate Fellow @alhohlfeld.bsky.social.

German “hate speech” laws are already troubling, but their enforcement has become alarmingly disproportionate, unconstitutional, and incompatible with a free society. When investigation becomes punishment, the rule of law itself is at risk. Check out my latest blog post at @futurefreespeech.org

A dangerous trend continues www.politico.eu/article/germ...

Humans are humans on TikTok too.

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

“Every counterrevolution, like every revolution, begins by being afraid of its own people.” —Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963) 🇩🇪

20 years ago, Denmark upheld free speech even when cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad sparked deadly protests. But today, @mchangama.bsky.social says European democracies are increasingly choosing appeasement — and the violence hasn't stopped.

Those who point out falsehoods on their own side are assumed to be working for the enemy, because our hunter-gatherer brains struggle to comprehend that someone could genuinely care about the truth more than any tribe. This makes political movements hard to self-correct.

Free speech doesn’t belong to the left or the right. Both will claim it when it suits their purpose, and both will disavow it for the same reason. The only people who genuinely support free speech are those rare souls whose principles are strong enough to survive politics itself.

In a webinar today about the threats to expression in the U.S., I said the question was ultimately more about whether people would have the courage to fight for their rights than whether they would win those fights. You do not retain rights you willingly give up.

"I had friends say to me, look, we can oppose political violence without whitewashing this guy. I spent some time thinking about that over the weekend...and my reaction honestly is that it is too little to just say we oppose political violence."

Student acceptance of violence to silence speakers is at a record high. In 2020, 1 in 5 students said violence was acceptable to stop a speaker. In 2025, that number is 1 in 3. That’s a 79% increase in just five years. And it’s chilling.

BREAKING: Charlie Kirk was shot during an event at Utah Valley University today. Details of the incident are still unfolding. Political violence is never an acceptable response to speech. Free speech allows us to settle our differences peacefully and is essential to a free and democratic society.

"Nobody ever says, 'We're censoring protected speech'...They say it's misinformation, or it's support of terrorism, or it's antithetical to American values."

Scientific activism "shares essential basic assumptions with its populist counterpart and thus plays into its hands" 💯 www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

Bluesky is now blocking access to people in Mississippi due to the state's problematic age verification law. Thread (and attached blog post) have more details...

🎯"the dominant approach since 2016 fundamentally misunderstands the nature of communication... researchers and policymakers ought to engage with the full complexity of communication processes, including the agency of messengers and audiences"

Given the current moment in the US, liberals should reflect on the dangers of illiberal censorship and government repression of speech in all forms www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Have there been civil society complaints about the binding commitments that Ali Express entered with the EU Commission to settle its DSA investigation? They look like they were negotiated by someone who didn't read the whole DSA. Particularly Art. 8. 1/ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/comm...

Never empower government in ways you would regret once power changes hands

"Should the right gain more power on the continent (as it has done in Hungary, with dire consequences for free speech), more centrist European leaders could soon realize the risks of the infrastructure they are building to surveil and punish hate speech" @conor64.bsky.social

What happens when democracies silence dissent in the name of fighting extremism? In an essay for the UK's Commission for Countering Extremism, @mchangama.bsky.social warns that censorship can backfire—fueling the very extremism it seeks to stop.

While it was primarily a left-wing thing (2015-21), canceling attempts are now dominated by the right in U.S. academia: open.substack.com/pub/heterodo...

"We cannot allow fear to become the quiet condition of exile. Protecting freedom of expression must mean more than providing refuge; it must also mean defending the right to speak, organise, and live without intimidation—even beyond borders" @carmenlau.bsky.social 💯 www.linkedin.com/posts/carmen...

Update: Pornhub & XVideos 2025 Risk Assessments, Audits & Audit Implementation Reports available

My hot take on the Commission's data disclosure template for GPAI models. Key questions remain, particularly on the requirement to list 10% of scraped domain names. The template might inform copyright lawsuits, but it might also be litigated.👇 www.mlex.com/mlex/article...

"The fact that demand drives misinformation consumption and sharing is perhaps the most important lesson from the misinformation literature."

Excellent, comprehensive paper (and thread) on the lack of impact of generative AI on elections so far. There was so much hype around it in 2023-24, mostly fuelled by AI people with no understanding of elections, politics, the information environment or how persuasion works (or mostly doesn't).

"Ihre Aufgabe ist es nicht, irgendwelche ›Aktionstage‹ zu veranstalten oder irgendwelche ›Zeichen zu setzen‹. Das macht die Polizei in autoritären Regimen: Sie setzt Zeichen – zur Einschüchterung und Abschreckung." @Besser_Deniz @pen_berlin 💯 penberlin.de/pm-ja-selbst...

Highly worrying development in Germany. Raiding houses and confiscating devices are not only completely disproportionate measures that encroach deeply on fundamental rights but also create severe chilling effects on freedom of expression netzpolitik.org/2025/hausdur...

"But unfortunately, today, not just students, I feel like too many people believe in something closer to freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech" Let's get real about free speech - brilliant TED talk by @glukianoff.bsky.social www.ted.com/talks/greg_l...

X is piloting a way to use its Community Notes to highlight posts where people of typically differing opinions actually agree w/ea. other. www.axios.com/2025/06/05/x.... For stats on Community Notes,🔖our NoteTracker app, it provides a view of the fights du jour on X. notetracker.socialmediadata.org

New preprint on "Political Disinformation: Fake News, and Deep Fakes". In the piece, I take stock of the current state of disinformation research. osf.io/preprints/so... 🧵 A few key points:

Everyone thinks the people on the other side are more "extreme" in their views then they actually are. It's a consistent, symmetric, large effect. But why? www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/why-do-the...

Why Europe Cannot Protect Democracy by Distrusting Its Citizens. Delighted to have submitted feedback to the European Democracy Shield together with @futurefreespeech.org www.bedrockprinciple.com/p/europe-can...

🛡️ Will the EU’s “Democracy Shield” protect democracy or undermine it? We’ve submitted a public comment to the European Commission expressing concerns over the EU’s initiative to address online misinformation and foreign interference. ✍️: Alexander Hohlfeld

"Democracies cannot be defended by imitating the tactics of their enemies. They must show confidence in their values, be that openness, pluralism, and the power of persuasion over prohibition." @nataliealkiviadou.bsky.social & @thejustncase.net www.bedrockprinciple.com/p/germany-ba...

"What, practically, should Europeans do? They should start by returning to the old liberal ideas that noisy disagreement is better than enforced silence and that people should tolerate one another’s views" www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

Public advertising repositories are critical to identify scam advertisements, hybrid threat campaigns, and coordinated information operations. Today, preliminarily findings were sent to TikTok for not having its ad repository in compliance with the DSA.

In February 2024 our team at then SNV published a report on the #tiktok Ad Library and it's short comings: https://tiktok-audit.com/blog/2024/Tik-Tok-oclock/ Today the European Commission announced that their investigations, which included an interview with us) also conclude that the ad library […]

Chatbots still often refuse to answer prompts on controversial and potentially hurtful issues not classified as hate speech under human rights law but response rates has jumped to 74% from just 51% in 2024 @mchangama.bsky.social tells #CDS2025. Read more here www.bedrockprinciple.com/p/one-year-l...

Very explicit recognition of back-channel communications between government and platform companies, in this case requesting content take-downs apparently without a clear legal basis?

At this point, these books are road maps. They tell you where we are heading.

Many self-proclaimed opponents of the far right often turn out to be their biggest supporters. Those who attempt to censor their opponents or expose them using undemocratic methods such as #doxxing only cast the targets as victims and increase their support