![]() ![]() ![]() And the gigantic power wielded by a few tech companies was troubling, regardless of how they used it.Īll this led Mr Mchangama (whose paternal forebears came from the Comoro Islands) to apply his legal mind to supporting intellectual liberty: by podcasting and founding a think-tank, and by studying free expression’s fluctuating fortunes over the past 25 centuries. Western governments were often heavy-handed in their regulation of extremist discourse. Authoritarian regimes proved adept at exploiting and policing social media for their own malign ends. Even then, though, digital freedom was already in retreat. The victory in 2008 of Barack Obama, an erstwhile outsider, marked a high point of those expectations. In the late 1990s, when he was a student, the internet presaged a glorious era of liberty for people who otherwise lacked money or power to speak and organise. This was not what Mr Mchangama, the product of a confidently secular Nordic democracy, had expected.Īs his new book recalls, free expression was suffering setbacks on other fronts, too. Respectable people across the Western world blamed the cartoonist and his editors, not the repressive forces that drove the newspaper staff into hiding. He found the response elsewhere even more alarming. ![]()
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