Free Speech

Hasan Piker, among the most influential voices in progressive politics, said over the weekend that he was detained and questioned by immigration officials at Chicago's O'Hare airport.

Newsweek reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for comment via email on Monday.

Rumeysa Ozturk returned to Massachusetts on Saturday evening, eyes welling with joy and gratitude at the end of her six-week odyssey in federal custody, a case that stirred outrage over President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

A flight carrying Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen studying at Tufts University on a student visa, touched down at Boston Logan International Airport one day after a federal judge in Vermont ordered that she be immediately released from a detention facility in Louisiana.

The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday.

It is the broadest and most detailed directive so far on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign to rid the military of diversity and equity programs, policies and instructional materials. And it follows similar efforts to remove hundreds of books from the libraries at the military academies.

Salt Lake City adopted three new city flags Tuesday, an effort to circumvent a new Utah law that effectively banned flying LGBTQ Pride and other flags at public buildings in the state.

Mayor Erin Mendenhall, a Democrat, presented the proposal to the City Council, which adopted it at its meeting Tuesday night. It incorporates the city's flag into designs celebrating Juneteenth, LGBTQ rights and trans rights.

Two years ago, I moved to the United States to found a think tank devoted to defending global free expression. What better place to launch than America, which is, according to the law professor and First Amendment expert Lee Bollinger, “the most speech protective of any nation on Earth, now or throughout history”? 

 A Brooklyn woman said she feared for her life as she was chased, kicked, spit at and pelted with objects by a mob of Orthodox Jewish men who mistook her as a participant in a protest against Israel’s far-right security minister.

The assault, recorded by a bystander, unfolded Thursday near the global headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Crown Heights, where an appearance by Itamar Ben-Gvir set off clashes between pro-Palestinian activists and members of the neighborhood’s large Orthodox Jewish community.

Imagine this scenario.

The interior minister of a country that considers itself a democracy reports hundreds of citizens to the police for making critical statements about her while she is in office. Many of them are given hefty monetary fines or even prison sentences.

In protest, a journalist publishes a satirical meme. It features a real photograph of the interior minister holding a sign that is digitally altered so that, apocryphally, it reads: “I hate freedom of speech.”

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at "restoring freedom of speech." But judging from his administration's policies and his actions as a private litigant, Trump's commitment to that principle is highly selective at best.

The percentage of Americans who think the government should "take steps to restrict false information online" is shrinking.

According to new data from the Pew Research Center, Americans are losing patience for the idea that the government should censor in the name of stopping misinformation.

Pew also found decreasing support for the idea that tech companies should make such efforts on their own.