Nov 22, 2022

FIRE’s new Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr and the Cato Institute’s Will Duffield join the show to discuss a slew of recent free speech news. California gets it right on rap lyrics but wrong on coronavirus misinformation. One Texas school district repeatedly ventures into book banning. LeBron James spreads...

Nov 3, 2022

FIRE’s Will Creeley and Aaron Terr join the show to discuss a slew of recent free speech news: What do we make of Elon Musk buying Twitter? Is PayPal fining its users $2,500 for promoting “misinformation”? Is New York trying to destroy Twitch? And do public employees in Charlottesville, Va., need to shut their...

Oct 20, 2022

Do books need a special editor who reads for offensive content? And who gets to decide what’s offensive anyway?

This week we are joined by authors Kat Rosenfield and Vesper Stamper to discuss censorial trends in book publishing, including the rise of so-called “sensitivity readers” and the sometimes successful...

Oct 5, 2022

Does the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protect a private social media company’s right to moderate content on its platform?

A new ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit says it does not, and that a Texas law preventing viewpoint discrimination on social media platforms...

Sep 29, 2022

“Should academic journals appoint themselves social justice gatekeepers?”

That is the question journalist and author Jonathan Rauch asks in responding to new ethics guidance from the academic journal Nature Human Behaviour. The journal introduces the guidance by ominously noting that “although academic freedom is...