The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom

Mchangama and Kosseff bring together two of the most rigorous voices in the free speech debate — Mchangama from the historical and comparative tradition, Kosseff from First Amendment law — to address what they identify as a global crisis of free expression. The book's argument is not simply libertarian: it takes seriously the harms that disinformation, hate speech, and coordinated manipulation cause, while making the case that the regulatory and platform-enforcement responses to those harms are generating their own serious costs for democratic discourse.

The tension between free speech values and counter-disinformation imperatives is one of the defining fault lines in contemporary information policy, and Mchangama and Kosseff engage it with more analytical depth than most. For practitioners who advise governments or platforms on information policy, the book is essential reading precisely because it complicates the case for intervention without dismissing the underlying problem.