Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet

Kaye served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression from 2014 to 2020, and this book draws on that vantage point to examine how major platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — have become the de facto regulators of global public discourse, making consequential decisions about permissible speech with minimal accountability and enormous variation in how they apply their own rules across different languages and national contexts.

The book is concise and analytically sharp. Kaye is not a free speech absolutist — he takes seriously the harms that unmoderated platforms enable — but he insists that the human rights framework developed over decades of international law provides a better foundation for content governance than the ad hoc, opaque processes that platforms have developed. For practitioners working on platform policy and information integrity, this is an essential reference for the human rights dimensions of content moderation.