Media education, regulation, and organizing against Big Tech in Europe | Ep. 7

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Just a quick heads up before we get started. There are a few curse words in this episode. Okay, here’s the show. And you can hear me all right?

Laura Flanders: I can hear you fine.

Michael Fox: Lovely. Okay. And I will begin. Last fall, I visited the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. It’s located on this big campus in the hills west of the city. And I was there to interview people about something that had happened just the week before. So this was October, October 2025. The month before on September 10th, Charlie Kirk was killed. Remember he was a young, far right US activist, Christian nationalist, founder of the conservative organization, Turning Point USA. And he used to do these speaking tours on US campuses where he would debate people in public and put forth his controversial, conspiratorial and office racist or sexist ideas. So back in Spain, following Charlie Kirk’s killing, a young far right Spanish activist named Vito Kiles decided he was going to do the same thing in Spain, in Kirk’s honor. He was going to visit universities across the country and hold Kirk style debates in public with controversial or incendiary rhetoric.

And he kicked off his tour at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The problem was he never really kicked it off. See, the autonomous university is one of the most radically progressive universities in the country. It has staunchly defended the independence movement for the region of Catalunia. And the university actually told him he didn’t have permission to speak because of the chaos that could ensue. So he arrived anyway and so did anti-fascist protesters who filled the main plaza. They squared off with Qiles supporters holding Spanish flags. Both sides protested, shouted at each other until the Catalunia police force showed up. And then they pushed the groups back with batons and shields and riot police and shut it all down. The following week, I traveled to the university to ask students what they thought about what happened and about Vito’s plan to try and speak. So I spoke with this one journalism student. His name is Pune Velez.

He said, Vito Quiles came here to stand with a megaphone, to shout a few things, to give a speech and not to answer questions, he said. In fact, he told me that’s even worse than what Charlie Kirk did. Another student told me everyone can have their own thoughts, but to come to a university to do anything, you have to ask for permission. And from what I understand, he didn’t have permission to come here. And he was warned in fact not to come. Jugo Guillaro sees it differently. He’s a history student who was in the group of Qiles supporters with the Spanish flag. I wanted to have a debate, he said, to share ideas even if we didn’t agree because that’s really the spirit of the university and to keep that spirit. But then he said he ended up trying to separate people and almost got hit several times.

So here’s the thing. Most of the students I spoke with, but not all of them, told me that Vito Quiles wasn’t just trying to do a speaking tour in the name of free speech. He was using Charlie Kirk’s death as a way to push his far right vision of the world and a US style free speech definition across Spain. And they say his goal was to get exactly what happened. Chaos, protests, police violence, media attention. Can you introduce yourself real fast?

Sergio Villanueva: Yeah. So my name is Sergio Villanueva Barcelova. I’m associate professor in the University of Barcelona in the communication studies and media studies.

Michael Fox: And I spoke to him about this as well. And he said

Sergio Villanueva: Every time that a right wing politician watch some notoriety, he or she goes to the Autonomous University and she gets a riot. She gets public in media. She gets publicity. So Bitokiles went to that specific university because he knew that in that specific university there is this big contestation that is very politically affirmed and he would get that reaction. He wanted this. He wanted attention.

Michael Fox: And so he got it. I think it’s important to say that the next universities where he tried to also speak on his tour also blocked him from doing so. The University of Regents essentially wouldn’t give him permission because they said he wasn’t there to have an open debate. He was there to stir up trouble and to create a media attention. And I think this is interesting because again, it shows the difference in definitions of free speech in the United States and abroad. Charlie Kirk found the space to speak on university campuses in the United States despite his controversial and incendiary rhetoric, but not in Spain. And there’s a reason for that. One student I interviewed told me,

She said, “I believe that freedom of expression is the right to say whatever you want, but the limit is when you disrespect other groups of people that have a different ideology perhaps. You can debate with a person who’s different from you, but without disrespecting them, that you have freedom of expression until you disrespect the other or the other person’s ideology. In her opinion, Vito Kiles and others on the far right have a discourse that is disrespectful to others. They thrive on attacking, dividing and using others as scapegoats. And again, as I’ve looked at a lot in this podcast, this in the United States is protected speech under the First Amendment. Their free speech is seen as absolute, but in Brazil, Europe and elsewhere, the right to free speech is balanced amid other rights. So your right to free speech doesn’t trump my right not to be harmed by your speech.

But the far right and the powerful owners of US tech firms are hiding behind the discourse of free speech to push their incendiary rhetoric. And they’re doing it far beyond the borders of the United States. Spain is not the only place where far right activists or US tech firms are trying to push their agenda abroad into Europe and their US definition of free speech. But people are pushing back. All of that in a minute.
This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m honored to be joined today by Laura Flanders. She is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly known as the Laura Flanders Show on public television. And she has had a long illustrious career in journalism. Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so great to be with you and I’m fascinated by that story you just told.

Michael Fox: It is crazy and I’m sure we will dive into more of this. Laura, I just want to say I’m so excited to chat with you in particular because you kind of have a foot in these two worlds in the United States, in Europe. You grew up in the UK. You’ve had most of your professional career in the United States. And I think that’s so important for understanding this conversation today, right? Because we’re talking about free speech in these two different worlds and the different definitions and also disinformation. What does that mean? I just wanted to start, Laura, what is your definition of free speech?

Laura Flanders: Well, before we get there, I think what your story illustrates and makes a think about and what you’re alluding to in terms of what are the distinctions between a kind of European sense of free speech and an American one takes me right back to the core distinction I think really between our two cultures. One being a culture of the individual with all of its wonderful assets. In the US, we have this supposedly invilable individual right to free speech and it sort of trumps everything not to use that word. In Europe, societies there actually think about the social. It’s not horrifying to imagine a collective and to think about collective rights. Now we can always take that too far and there’s certainly histories of abuse in both countries and I hope we get a chance to talk about that. But in broad strokes, what I’m reminded, I’ve been in Barcelona also when you go back to the history, the history’s everywhere on the walls of the Civil War and that sense of a collective struggle for freedom and for a different set of priorities.

Barcelona was at the heart of that Civil War struggle for an anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian style of government complete with communists and anarchists and the autonomous university has a lot of its roots in that strugle. So anyway, you’ve kicked us off in a really interesting place because I think as we’ll see through this conversation, that comes up over and over again that European governments have a long tradition of balancing individual rights with other rights for better and for ill as well here.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, thank you so much for grounding us in that because it’s so true. And I don’t think that enough people in the United States understand this core difference and also understand this idea of society as the whole outside of the United States. So thank you for grounding us in that. So this episode, we’re going to be traveling to Europe to understand how Europeans consider free speech and also look at kind of the threats from big tech moguls to push their agenda. And in particular, this episode, I really want to focus around disinformation, fake news, and the battle against it in particular that’s happening in Europe. So Laura, I want to continue our conversation in a place that you and I were just speaking about recently and that is Northern Ireland.

Audio Clip: In a capital city in the British Isles, people are forced to flee their homes by a mob, which was intent on causing havoc and setting fires.

Michael Fox: Violent riots and fires in Belfast in Northern Ireland just took off in mid-June. They rippled across the city for several days after a violent knife attack went viral over social media. The attacker was reportedly either from Sudan or Chad and his nationality sparked a wave of anti-immigrant violence. Migrant families were forced to flee their homes. And here’s the thing, Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, played a key role in fueling this violence. According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US and UK-based NGO, Musk’s role was “instrumental” in the Belfast riots. He helped to spread calls for protests from anti-immigrant activists and politicians on X. One of them read, “Only by protesting repeatedly and loudly will there be change?” According to the report, more than half of the more than 100 million views across three accounts came from Musk’s reach on the platform.

People responded to those posts on X with nearly 4,000 comments calling for lynchings and other offenses against immigrants. And the director of that organization Imran Ahmed said no individual played a bigger role in spreading this content on X than Musk himself. As the owner of X and its most followed user, Musk has unparalleled power to shape what people see online. With that power comes responsibility for the content and conduct his platform promotes. Laura, did you see this unfold? And what are your thoughts about Musk’s role here?

Laura Flanders: Well, it’s fascinating. You know, Michael, I started as a journalist in Northern Ireland. I don’t know whether you know that, but when I was like 23, I was in Belfast in the 1980s during the so – called troubles. The Irish of course called it the trouble with England and saw conflict in the streets of the sort that we saw in the story that you just told. So for many of us, it was like a flashback to that earlier era. And younger generations who had memories of that conflict where there were Molotov cocktails thrown and bombs in the streets and troops and guns and regular gunfire, I think almost sort of dug into their roots maybe to sort of revive some scene that they’d seen in the histories of their families. I was reminded in the context of this conversation of what the free speech situation was in the ’80s when British anti-terrorism law, again, this is the other side of the collective approach to speech rights in the name of protecting the British, especially the interests of the British in Northern Ireland that were being contested by a liberation nationalist independence movement at that time led by Sinfeig and the Irish Republican Army in the name of protecting certain people from other people.

The government of Margaret Thatcher passed these Prevention of Terrorism Act laws that restricted broadcasting rights for Sinfeigh, the political party that represented the nationalist’s point of view.

Audio Clip: Hello and good morning. Yesterday, the government banned all British television and radio stations from broadcasting interviews with members of Xinfein. How are their supporters? But will it reduce terrorism or merely curb press freedom?

Laura Flanders: And they literally were not allowed on the broadcast airwaves. Now this is pre-internet, pre-YouTube, any of that. But you had this ridiculous scenario that I remember where the broadcasters got around this ban by hiring actors to say the words of the politicians. So it didn’t stop the ideas getting out there. I just made an absurdity out of the situation. And it did reduce the number of interviews that were conducted with Sinfeig politicians who had members of parliament elected to parliament by, I don’t know, I’ve seen statistics of 60 to 85% because broadcasters just didn’t want to deal with it. So they have an example of very heavy handed use of censorship by the government in the name of protecting some people from other people. And this was a period of a lot of violence. Most of it in Northern Ireland, which was at the time occupied by British troops, just to remind people.

So I’m thinking, okay, well there you have the government censoring a whole political party and point of view and its representatives. Today, it’s not the government that’s causing the problem, let’s say. It’s the owner of a for – profit privately held monopoly business. And I think you can say that X is kind of a monopoly in the sense of it holds disproportionate power, sort of uncontestable power in that sphere of commentary social media, which is worse, which is better. I mean, it’s really a very good question. And when you asked me to defin free speech and I savvily avoided answering your question, I think it’s partly because I could agree with the Barcelona students who you interviewed who said anybody has a right to say anything. They just don’t have a right to say it without contestation. They don’t have a right to say it and not be confronted by another point of view.

That’s all fine and good until you get to the point of this kind of monopoly control, this corporate control. In principle, I left the UK and came to the US because it was a land of greater freedom and independence, less sort of nanny England control of life in general. But now we’re in kind of musky United States. We’re in musky world where that control is being exerted not by the nanny state, but by corporations with a private interest, a profit motive to stir up a certain kind of conflict. So we can talk more about that, but you’ve really hit at a very fascinating place, Northern Ireland, to discuss this question of speech.

Michael Fox: This brings me back to what I was speaking with my co-host Mark Steiner in an earlier episode about how speech, when it was censored throughout the history of the United States and elsewhere, it’s always been the powerful censoring the voices, the marginalized, the poor, the black and brown, the people fighting to stand up, to rise up. And this is what reminds me when you mentioned Margaret Thatcher censoring Xin Fin and censoring the speech coming out of Ireland, it is the powerful censoring the people who do not have power. That is where you see speech. And it’s the same thing now. It is the powerful, although it’s coming from a corporation, it’s coming from Musk. It is the powerful that are doing this against others.

Laura Flanders: Although interesting, they are not so much censoring as exploiting this free speech right in the name of their corporation as an individual. And I think that’s where it all gets very complicated because they are presenting themselves as bastions of free speech, opposing censorship and sort of calling the bluff of governments that say they defend free speech. We can’t possibly talk about the history of Ireland and England without mentioning that the whole Irish language was banned under British colonial rule. So the control through language control is a part of this picture too.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. And that is exactly what this woman who I spoke with this week told me about. Her name is Jude Ferrell. She’s Irish. She’s actually a former tech worker. She worked at Google for several years. And I wanted to speak with her because last year she founded this organization, Your Tech: Their Deaths, to protest against big tech in Ireland and in particular the role of big tech in supporting the genocide in Palestine. And

Jude Ferrell: It’s a grassroots led initiative, but it’s very much so brick by brick. And a small committed group of people can impact change. And that is in Irish blood, that is in our DNA.

Michael Fox: And in fact, when she spoke, she had just left a protest in Dublin against an Israeli tech company, Sneak Technology that’s trying to sign a contract with one of Ireland’s largest banks. Anyway, about the Belfast riots, she told me it was easy for these big tech companies and Elon Musk to put the blame on immigrants.

Jude Ferrell: There is a very big issue in Ireland with a cost of living crisis, with public transport, with infrastructure, with healthcare, with education.For all this money the imperialist assets are throwing in here. Ireland is really, really struggling. And it’s very easy for social media to target immigrants, which you can’t be Irish and be racist. And

Michael Fox: I just love this quote. “We are a nation that is built on immigration, “she said.

Jude Ferrell: “We had to leave Ireland due to our own genocide thanks to the British, to our own manmade famine thanks to the British. And we went to the places like America and Australia and built those countries. You cannot be Irish and be racist. But fear is a very powerful tool to use on social media and Irish people are struggling.

Michael Fox: And this is what we saw. And I just want to give a little context about Ireland today and big tech because I don’t think a lot of people understand this. Remember first that Belfast is a city in Northern Ireland. So politically it’s actually part of the UK. But regardless, Ireland and Northern Ireland have become major tech hubs over the last two decades. More than 10% of the Irish GDP comes from the tech industry. They provide more than 160,000 jobs across the country. Although AI is already taking its toll and roughly, I think the figures from earlier this year is that 20,000 people have lost their jobs to AI just recently. Almost all of the major tech companies have their European headquarters here. And in fact, some people have even called Ireland Europe’s Silicon Valley. These tech platforms chose Ireland because they speak English clearly and because the country’s low corporate tax rate.
And Jude told me in the beginning they were really excited that these tech companies chose them. She says she was really happy to work for Google, but those times have clearly changed. She says today she is really worried about the discourse from the tech billionaires and so – called free speech absolutists infecting Ireland and Europe because they have this international reach and there are no regulations coming out of the United States. So one of the things I think that she said that was really interesting is that your future, America, is linked to ours.

Jude Ferrell: So if you fuck shit up, you fuck it up for everybody. And it’s the same with the United Kingdom. It’s the same with America. It’s same with Germany. You cannot view big tech or freedom of speech in isolation. It would be the biggest and the most naive error for any of us to take that aproach. What happens in imperialist countries like the United States trickles down to us here in Ireland.

Michael Fox: And she also told me about how, this is what you were just speaking to Laura, is that how important free speech is for her, but not the absolutist free speech that we hear about from the United States or from Musk. Not free speech where you’re inciting hatred on others, but that free speech is the most important thing in Ireland.

Jude Ferrell: Ireland, we lost our language. It was illegal to speak to learn Irish. And that impact we see generations later. And we’re only starting to understand the impact. It’s like we’ve got a hangover from our own oppression, the silencing of our religion, the silencing of our language, of our culture. So yeah, free speech is incredibly important in Ireland.

Michael Fox: So free speech, but not the freedom for the big tech platforms to run ram shot over everyone in defense of their quest for evermore power and money. Laura, how do you see all this? What does all this mean as these tech companies are arriving in Ireland and what Ireland means within this context for Europe?

Laura Flanders: Well, this takes us down a different trajectory. At least my mind goes to a different, most kind of conspiratorial place. And just for what it’s worth, I think, Ireland, Barcelona. You’ve talked about right-wing activists in these two places. What are these two places have in common? Ireland North and South has been a place of progressive activism for different reasons coming from different roots in some cases, but progressive activism for sure. If you think of the conflict, if you think of the genocide in Palestine over the last few years, it’s been Ireland that has led the United Nations along with South Africa and a few others in the calling out of the genocide and the supporting of resolutions of the United Nations that use that language and call for the prosecution of Israeli leaders.

Audio Clip: To do nothing is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Laura Flanders: Barcelona, interestingly, had one of the most anti-monopoly, anti-corporate, anti-gig economy regimes until recently with the election about a Kalao years ago. Barcelona, going back to those roots in the Civil War, has been a place of progressive foment and really strong anti-capitalist collectivist experimentation, let’s just say. It’s very proud of its cooperatives and its collectives, as I’m sure you found out. So I think, well, why are these people focusing in these places? And I can’t help but get curious about what their political motivations might be. So I’ll just say I was in Ireland recently and with respect to immigration, at least according to public opinion polls, you have majorities not just supporting immigration, but saying that they appreciate migrants. So they’re taking on, I think, a big challenge, the Bannons and Musks and Peter Thiels of the world, but it’s a challenge they seem to be up to and up for.

I just saw a report that Peter Thiel is holding a conference in Dublin convening some of the same people he convenes in this country to talk about world dominance through AI. All of this is not exactly an answer to your question, but it’s the kind of thoughts I’m having prompted by your interviews and your reporting. So thank you.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Well, there’s two very interesting things. First, so Jude told me when I asked her about kind of the far right and this discourse and immigrants and kind of the rise in the country, she said actually their bark is worse than their bite.

Jude Ferrell: I think they’re like one of those yappy little dogs. They don’t have much power or control in Ireland yet, thankfully.

Michael Fox: And in fact, what we saw in the big fuel protests that were happening back in April, big protests around the country, people standing up. She said the right was also trying to steer this in the direction of blaming immigrants and blaming immigration and people just weren’t having it. They were shut down fairly fast. So that’s on the positive side. People are standing up against that narrative.

Laura Flanders: I think one thing that’s different, the two cultures going back once again, is in the US you have our two-party system and that makes it much easier to say we’re great, you’re terrible, we’re wonderful, you’re evil, you’re the threat to all things good. In Europe, generally in Ireland certainly you have a multi-party system and you may have far right parties, but you have other parties too. There’s a much more diversity of discourse and you have, of course, a long history of multiple media at each other’s throats. People are used to weighing different opinions and the idea of one enormous megaphone influencing an important and large part of the population I think is harder to pull off there than it is here.

Michael Fox: Yeah. And you mentioned Peter Thiel, Laura, which is really important because he was going to hold his event in Ireland. And of course for people that don’t remember, he’s the Silicon Valley tech financier, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir. And he was planning this international conference of his secret organization known as Dialogue. And then they wanted to talk about World War III battlefield technologies and also how to build a cult, which were some of the things that were on the agenda. Anyway, the meeting was going to take place in this upscale hotel in Ireland, but Jude and her organization and several other groups started to organize against it. They held some protests. They were going to hold more protests over the next week. And in the end, the meeting was canceled just a couple days ago. Ah,

Laura Flanders: There you go. Popular action, go for it. They didn’t even need to protest. They just needed to say they were going

Michael Fox: To protest. Exactly. Excellent. Exactly.

Jude Ferrell: It’s not just Peter Thiel. It’s not just Palantir, but it is the audacity and arrogance of individuals like Thiel that they think that they would be welcome in any country when we know that they are entirely focused on their own power and privilege. They are not using technology or data for the good of humankind. They’re only using it to fill their own coffers.

Michael Fox: This is just one of those moments that I think we need to pause to remember that sometimes A, standing up against these things, standing up online, but also getting active, getting organized and people getting out in the streets can have an impact against what we’re seeing right now.

Laura Flanders: Well, that brings me back to our US media. How come I didn’t know that? I’ve been looking at that story. Where is it? This is why the real new This is programs like mine, independent media is so important to bring people the stories not just of the threats and the dangers, but also the victories of people’s movements. So just a little self-promotion for us.

Michael Fox: Love it. Laura, I wanted to say one more thing about that Ireland that I did not know before I move on. Jude told me that the term boycott, did you know that that was coined in Ireland?

Laura Flanders: Yes, I actually did.

Michael Fox: It’s amazing. So apparently this was when tenant farmers demanded a rent reduction in the 1880s from a British captain named Charles Boycott. That’s so cool. So cool. So anyway, again, it’s kind of a reminder of the excitement and the power and the organizing of Ireland and just gives us a little bit of hope I think. Collective

Laura Flanders: Spirit. Collective spirit.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this question of fake news and disinformation and the attempts to fight it. And I just want to say very quickly that I kind of feel like there’s this elephant in the room in the United States that no one’s discussing because around the US elections, 2024, pretty much all the social media platforms suddenly said, “You know what? I don’t think we’re going to fact check anymore. I think that Trump is now in office and we don’t really need to do this. ” And so it’s this thing where everybody realizes that there’s a bunch of misinformation and disinformation and fake news out there, but at least from the tech billionaires and from Silicon Valley, there’s nothing being done about this. And let me just also say that not only is there nothing being done, but Musk continues to push his narrative.

And in Ireland, that wasn’t the first time that Musk was throwing his weight around. And I just have a couple of statistics that I wanted to throw out. So first off, just remember he has 240 million followers on X. It’s the most, he’s the highest number of followers on the platform. According to a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations in recent years, he has attacked prime ministers, calling them criminal tyrants or traders. He’s backed far right parties, fabricated statistics, and reorganized X’s algorithm to amplify right-wing voices and suppress democratic accounts. In Germany, he boosted the far right party before the 2025 election and spread fabricated quotes. He posts attacks against the press roughly three times a day. And here’s the thing, he has his agenda. And of course, in the name of free speech, he is then pushing his own agenda out there.

But Europe has been pushing back in more ways than one. One way was in Ireland. The other way is the attempts to battle this information by another very unique way. And Laura, I want to take us to Finland right now.

Laura Flanders: All right, let’s go.

Michael Fox: So Finland is a Nordic country. It’s in Northern Europe, just to the east of Sweden. About a third of the country lies above the Arctic Circle and it shares a border that is 830 miles long with Russia. Russia actually controlled Finland for most of the 1800s. And that’s important because Finland has faced a barrage of Russian propaganda, troll farms and fake news in recent years, in particular beginning around the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. And what Finland did is pretty revolutionary. So as we’ve looked at this in this podcast, countries have tried to battle fake news and disinformation by taking content down or going after troll farms. Like in the case of Brazil, they’ve protested and tried to regulate speech in other parts of Europe. And in Finland, they’ve tried to battle against disinformation with education. So by teaching –

Laura Flanders: Shock horror.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So by teaching the young and old to how to distinguish between facts and opinion and propaganda, how to spot it, how to critically assess where the information is coming from and what are the reputable sites and what aren’t. And before I get into this, I just want to say that this is not new in Finland. So I’m just going to give a really quick history lesson here, Laura. Remember that this country, Finland, like much of Europe, was devastated by World War II. Almost 100,000 Finns died. They fought a bloody Soviet invasion from the East.

Audio Clip: The big boulder is being press into service as part of a roadblock or tank obstacle. And here in the depths of the Caribbean woods, Finnish artillery lays down a protective barrage beyond the Manaheim line.

Michael Fox: They lost parts of their territory to the Soviet Union and then they fought alongside the Axis Powers, Germany and Italy. So they were on the losing side of the war.

Audio Clip: A Finnish communique reports that 600 Russian planes bombed Helsinki last night causing fires and heavy damage. The raid lasted nearly 12 hours, the longest and heaviest air attack of

Michael Fox: The war. Anyway, the point is this, that was a time of tremendous propaganda used by all sides, in particular from Nazi Germany. And in Finland, they were just inundated with it. And when the war ended, they began to teach what they called then communication education in schools, which also came alongside the rise of film and cinema.

Saara Salomaa: Because people have always been worried about new media. And in 1950s, they were very worried about what will happen to young people when they see all kinds of garbage in cinema. And that’s how it started. And then it has been modified over the years.

Michael Fox: They now call this media education and media literacy. And Finland outlined a national policy around this in 2013. It was the first European country to do so. And I spoke with Sara Saloma about all of this.

Saara Salomaa: I work at the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency, which is a national body responsible for media education and promoting media literacy.

Michael Fox: She told me that in her life she actually wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, Laura, but that she took a class in college about this and she got hooked. And so she ended up doing her PhD on media education for kindergarten teachers.

Saara Salomaa: So I didn’t totally give up on kindergarten, but my work is now targeting all people in Finland.

Michael Fox: So she coordinates media education across Finland. And here’s what she told me. First, it isn’t just about one class. It’s something they do across all grades from kindergarten up to high school and also for adults and even seniors. And it doesn’t just happen in schools, but also libraries and NGOs. And it kind of crosses multiple disciplines. So they incorporate this in many, many different ways. I asked her the difference between media education and media literacy because I was confused about this. And she explained that media literacy are the skills you need to learn to analyze media. And media education is the actions that promote media literacy. So how to learn this. And so she explained that it’s not just discerning fact from opinion, but understanding the social perspective of media. So what’s being said, who’s being said? And I asked her to take a step back and just explain to me what this looks like actually in a classroom on a typical day.

Saara Salomaa: It’s hard to say what is a typical school day in Finland because our municipalities, schools and teachers all have a great freedom to choose how they implement our national curriculum. But if I think about, for example, 13 year olds, a media literacy lesson would be about reading a text and trying to discern what is a fact and what is opinion, for example.

Michael Fox: Or looking at a video or ads and trying to understand what’s behind the ads, like what’s the hidden message. And this is where I want to go right now to explain this a little bit more. We’re going to travel to Helsinki Finland’s capital late 2024, November. It’s cold and snowing outside. So put on your jacket, Laura.

Laura Flanders: All right, here we go.

Michael Fox: Inside the room, a teacher passes out these pages of different images to groups of teenage students sitting around desks. They’re analyzing what the media content is trying to say, who produced it, where it’s coming from.

Teacher says, “Who has produced the material that you watch? How do you produce it? Do you have your own ethical responsibility?” I think these questions are really important everywhere. One of the students said, school has taught me to interpret media as messages written in between lines. For example, through ads or fake pictures.” She says she started to look at it from a slightly different perspective more critically in terms of propaganda and disinformation. And here’s the thing, it’s not just one subject. It’s something that’s incorporated across all aspects, all subjects. And Laura, for me, I just feel like this is so important because you would imagine that this would just be a no-brainer. Everything, our entire lives is inundated today with media.

Audio Clip: In today’s fragmented media environment, it can be hard to know which news sources you can trust. Even I don’t always know where to turn if only there

Michael Fox: Was something. In social media, it’s every place. And yet we never step back and kind of analyze critically. I looked at some of the figures and the stats in the United States around media literacy. Is that happening in the states? And from what I found, it’s roughly half of the states have passed some laws mandating some form of media literacy, but it’s really incipient. It’s really early on. They’re trying to figure this out.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so interesting because what I’ve been looking at a lot recently are these age-specific digital access bans.

Audio Clip: Yes.

Laura Flanders: So in Australia, you have a ban on under 16s. In the UK, you had the Labor Party leader Starmer talking about a ban on under 16s using social media, things like TikTok and X and so on. Facebook, I think even YouTube. And the aproach is very much, let’s keep people off these platforms. And conveniently enough, in order to assess people’s ages, it all involves uploading biometric data to the web so that there’s yet more information that these huge corporations have on all of us. Biometric meaning eyes and fingers and whatever else they can use. They’re even proposing having AI assess photographs to see what age people are. You can imagine the mistakes. But the whole approach is how do we keep people off this platform rather than how do we regulate the platform? What you are providing is yet another idea is why don’t we just make people smarter?

Why don’t we just educate people? And that it seems to me is a classic collectivist in a good way approach of let’s actually inform people and give them the tools to assess this. And frankly, I think younger generations are going to be smarter about all of this than we are because they’ve seen the damage that it’s doing to their fellows. And I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of high schoolers and middle schoolers who are simply going off social media themselves because they don’t want to be tortured the way that they’ve seen their friends be tortured. So I think this is an interesting third way. And gosh, wow, how far we are from Finland.

Michael Fox: In so many ways, how far we are. Yeah. In fact, there was a stat in this one organization that had done a report about media literacy, the push for media literacy in the United States. And they said that more than 80% of students in the US would like to have media literacy classes taught. And it makes sense.

Laura Flanders: Yeah. I used to host a radio show that still is out there. It’s fabulous. Now hosted by Janine Jackson for FAIR, the Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting, the media watch groups called Counterspin. And we would sometimes go to classrooms and do simply a one-off demonstration, have people pick up their local paper or look at the news for a week and just say, okay, who got to speak? Who got to apear? How many sources were cited? How much space was used by ads versus by print? People loved it. Kids loved it. And it was the kind of thing anybody could do anywhere. Any teacher could actually initiate such a thing. People at FAIR could help. But it’s a fascinating exercise just to have people think twice about what they’re reading and listening and watching.

Michael Fox: Yeah. That’s awesome, Laura. And this was one of the questions I asked Sada. I said, “What does success look like for this? What does this look like really? ” And she said, “It’s actually kind of hard.”

Saara Salomaa: Because we don’t have a parallel version of Finland in which media literacy was never taught.

Michael Fox: I love this. But she said one of the ways is the fact that they’ve had several governments in power, the left and now the right is in power right now. And none of these governments have pushed to try and roll this back.

Saara Salomaa: Both of these governments, they have had media literacy in the program of government. So I think that is success story that regardless of what kind of political parties are in power, they still want to promote media literacy in Finland. Of course, if you would ask very right-wing politicians and very left-wing politicians what they mean with media literacy, that can be a different story. But on the other hand, they are not handpicking the initiatives themselves.

Michael Fox: And they also have something going for them in that their curriculum around media literacy isn’t governed by necessarily the government that’s in power. It’s a 10-year-long plan that they set up. So it’s not one government that can come in and then derail things and whatnot.

Saara Salomaa: And here I also think that it’s very important to stress that media literacy is not there to dictate what to think, but it’s supposed to be teaching how to think.

Audio Clip: Yeah.

Michael Fox: She also brought up several things that I think are important now. She said they’re facing many challenges, in particular reaching immigrant communities, poor communities in Finland. And the other thing is, of course, AI, which is making everything so much more complicated.

Saara Salomaa: Things are moving very quickly and it was kind of surprise for me how the big tech companies, how they took a side in the US elections and then US government.

Audio Clip: The golden age of America begins right now.

Saara Salomaa: And this has now been a topic of discussion very much in Europe that should we actually trust any US tech companies or should we try to get rid of US tech companies as soon as possible? Our chessboard is constantly changing. In media education, we have to run really fast even to stay where we are.

Laura Flanders: Well, I love her idea that there’s no alternate Finland to have as your control because that’s what we have in this country too. We’re constantly told we have free choice when it comes to media, but we don’t really. We have a limited array of options. So it’s not like you can just say, “I hate those networks. I’m going to go pick another one.” So that’s another way in which our media diet is presented to us as this wonderful universe of freedom, but it’s really not. It’s really who has the power, money to get to your eyeballs and that isn’t everyone.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So Sada said in closing that this was not a silver bullet.

Saara Salomaa: We can provide people possibilities to learn and to discuss these topics, to understand that not all the information is the same. So there are more and less reliable sources and they can develop practices that help them to recognize this information, for example. But at the same time, we need to also strengthen people’s trust in trustworthy media.

Michael Fox: It’s one answer to the threat and there need to be multiple answers. And that is the direction that I want to go into right now because as the United States has always pushed for deregulation and as we see Musk and Silicon Valley tech barons always talking about how regulation is actually another form of censorship, Europe has been pushing to fight with regulation. And I think it’s important to just underline this point before we dive into this, is that in the United States, this question of tech barons talking about regulation as censorship is kind of repeated daily. It’s the same thing as the absolutist free speech thing. But we have a ton of regulation in the United States. Television, radio, newspapers, print, all the legacy media. It’s all regulated. It’s all there. So why not tech companies and social media?

Laura Flanders: It’s useful to go back and see, well, how did it get regulated?

Audio Clip: I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged fuel. And

Laura Flanders: For much of it, we’re talking broadcasting. It got regulated in the 1930s and ’40s under the FDR administration and just before when you had a rise of right-wing demagogues using what was then the most influential media, namely radio, to stir up fascist movements in this country, movements that we forget we ever had. But it wasn’t like it just suddenly got regulated. It got regulated as an effort to protect democratic values and a democratic society when a threat was observed in a growing media. So in that case, it was radio and then those broadcasting regulations were extended, some of them, to television. We’ve had a huge fight around new technology, whether it’s online or online or social media technology where the tech companies have done their best as they would to keep themselves free of regulation and to present themselves as these bastions of free speech.

Well, that’s the same thing that the fascist demagogues in the ’30s presented themselves as bastions of free speech. European law again takes us back to where we began in the sense that they do guarantee under their Ministry of Injustice Acts, they do guarantee that there is a right to free speech, an individual right to freedom of expression, but they give a little bit of wiggle room and say the restrictions are allowed in the defense of a democratic society. So a democratic society trumps your right to call someone a name in public and to rally crowds to take out unwanted folks in your community or whatever. So again, it’s that balancing act that the Europeans are explicitly doing even in their law in a way that we don’t. And where we do in regulatory law, the public’s not educated about it. And instead we get this very binary black white attitude to free speech.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of over binaries in general and get very suspicious whenever they crop up.

Michael Fox: Amen. Absolutely, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Let’s live in the squishy middle.

Michael Fox: Amen. I love it. I love it. I want to underscore really quick the links that tech platforms have gone to to push their agenda and to stop the possibility of regulation. According to a 2025 investigation led by the Brazilian media outlet Ajen Shepublica together with Reporters Without Borders and several other outlets and journalists across numerous countries, between 2019 and 2025, big tech companies carried out nearly 3,000 lobbying actions across 10 countries and the European Union. It involved more than 1,400 company representatives and 2,500 public officials. Among the tactics were disinformation campaigns, funding supposed independent groups to oppose legislation, hiring former public officials to lobby in favor of the companies and arguing that national laws don’t apply. So the tech companies have gone to very unfair extreme lengths to push their agenda to ensure that regulations are not imposed on them. And specifically for this podcast, of course, they’ve been using all of this in the name of free speech, supposed free speech to defend their right to be unregulated under the guise that regulation means censorship.

Laura Flanders: It’s interesting because it has its parallel, of course, in the world of economics where you have governments at the local level often doing things like trying to ban big box stores, Walmarts or name it, and those same corporations saying this is a violation of our rights. They’re using the same argument we’ve seen over years, their power versus community power. This is the fight we’re in. And I don’t think there’s a more important fight in our lifetime.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. But the EU has moved forward.

Audio Clip: Hate speech and disinformation online. This is what we’re all fed up with, right? In the European Union, a groundbreaking new law is coming into effect this week to tackle exactly these problems.

Michael Fox: The European Union approved the Digital Services Act in 2022 and the European Media Freedom Act, which went into effect in August 2025. And of course these aren’t perfect, but they are steps in the right direction. And this is complicated, really complex legislation. I’m going to try and sum it up in about a minute or two here, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Good luck.

Michael Fox: But broadly, the Digital Services Act aims to increase transparency and accountability for big tech companies.

Audio Clip: Nothing in the DSA forces or asks or requests a platform to remove lawful content. The only thing that is being asked is illegal content. Content that is illegal in real life has no place online.

Michael Fox: And the European Media Freedom Act creates a set of rules to protect media pluralism and independence in the EU. So protecting media companies, journalists, and outlets that are already there. Anyway, I sat down and spoke with Eva Nenadic.

Iva Nenadic: Here I’m the scientific coordinator of the Center for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom.

Michael Fox: At the European University Institute just outside of Florence, Italy. She’s been a journalist for 10 years. She’s now a professor and she really knows her stuff because she’s actually been working in developing the framework around fighting disinformation through these acts since 2018. And I just want to say really fast that usually when we start to talk about regulation, myself included, my eyes kind of glaze over and I start looking out the window. It’s hard to stay focused when we’re talking about regulation because it’s something that’s so complex and confusing. But this stuff has real world impacts.This is really important and we need to understand it. So first off, tech platforms, social media AI, some of it is the most powerful technology information revolution we’ve ever seen and yet it’s a free for all. And so Eva told me that the goal is to try and reign in the online lawlessness and the power of big tech.

Iva Nenadic: Innovation is important, is relevant. It will sustain the Europe as we want to have, but at the same time, we cannot just unleash the wild west of innovation that doesn’t take any accountability or responsibility for the societal implications that these technologies, the way they are designed, but also the way they are used and misused.

Michael Fox: That is the logic of this legislation. Just to remind people, the EU is made up of 27 member countries and that this legislation is what they call regulation. So it means that they create regulation and then they send that to these countries to apply it harmoniously across the EU. I’m trying to envision in my head how this is done, how you could even do this in one country. And here we’re talking about 27 countries, so I can’t even imagine. But the biggest takeaways here are the Digital Services Act. Remember, this is about creating more transparency and accountability. The platforms are mandated to carry out yearly strategic risk assessments over what’s considered illegal speech, problematic, harmful speech. Large online platforms now have the legal obligation to provide access to their data to independent researchers.

Iva Nenadic: So this is really a game changer compared to what we’ve had before where European researchers were really struggling to get acces to platform data. And this was preventing us really from understanding what the risks are, what potential implications of any kind of action or activity by big tech are here in Europe.

Michael Fox: Regarding disinformation and particularly around the online discourse during elections, this is something that they’ve been, like I mentioned, they’ve been trying to tackle for almost a decade and it’s really complicated. And she gave one example why. I don’t know if you remember this, Laura, but disinformation isn’t just used for political purposes, but often monetary purposes. And she told me about this story of the Macedonian teenager during Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.

Audio Clip: Dmitri is 18 years old and he says that in the past six months he’s made more than $60,000 writing, posting and sharing fake news articles about the American election.

Michael Fox: NBC did this story. It was titled Fake News, how a parting Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies. Her point was that –

Iva Nenadic: Monetization can also be an incentive for disinformation. Doesn’t need to be just political. It can also be very economic.

Michael Fox: And so part of what they’re trying to do, the Media Services Act handles disinformation in kind of a self-regulatory framework. It loops back to the risk assessment. So they have to assess risk once a year. And then the companies have to show that they’re taking action against this risk to regulate things on the platform. Of course, the Digital Services Act, it can’t tell these companies what they should and should not do in terms of taking things down or not taking things down, but it’s pushing these tech platforms in a direction that they actually have to take actions. And there is a policing mechanism around this that these companies can be fined.

Audio Clip: If at some point we come to a non-compliance decision confirming the breach under the Digital Services Act, this could lead to fines going up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover.

Michael Fox: So that’s the Digital Services Act. And then there’s the European Media Freedom Act, which is essentially about really protecting the legacy media companies against the power and the growth of these tech firms. Because the way that Eva explained it to me is that these other companies are already regulated. Newspaper, television, radio, they already have their own regulations. They’re doing what they’re supposed to.

Iva Nenadic: So big tech companies that do not comply to the same level of regulation and they barely have any professional standards in operating should not be the ones who kind of censor media if you want me to simplify this very much.

Michael Fox: And so the idea is kind of protecting media content and giving these media outlets more power within this to receive special treatment on these platforms. They should be allowed to register. They should be able to receive preempted information or informed if anything is supposed to be removed. And so the idea is trying to move in a direction of what she calls, what Eva Nenedice calls more democracy.

Iva Nenadic: I think the very history and constitutional understanding of freedom of expression or free speech is different between the EU and the US. I think in some foundations it’s the same. So we are both striving… To have healthy democracy and the foundation for healthy democracy is free speech.

Michael Fox: Open communication, academic freedom, the freedom for people to voice their opinions, but –

Iva Nenadic: Instead, what we are increasingly having nowadays is extreme fragmentation and polarization. One of the paradigmatic shifts that have led us somehow to this is the very change of the basic infrastructure of the information environment. Because what we are seeing and how these platforms operate social media and now also moving to generative AI with gen AI applications, they are fragmenting information environment. They are separating us first in small groups through social media of like – minded people. And now with generative AI, we are shifting to what we call audience of one, where we interact with these systems in a very isolated, individualized bubbles. This is not compatible with democratic needs of a shared information ecosystem. And so this is in basics, in design is wrong.

Michael Fox: What she told me is just like we’ve been talking, Laura, what we’re increasingly seeing is this fragmentation, this polarization. Everyone’s broken into these two sides of us versus them. And it’s because of the very structure and infrastructure of these big tech platforms that this is happening.

Laura Flanders: Well, I want to take on the word big and them, because when you talk about big platforms, we know we’re talking about this big five players in this world, in this field that we’re talking about. We talk about them. There’s not so many of them. There’s a small number. I think that’s the problem. And I don’t think that any amount of regulation by government, even governments representing 27 countries or government representing 50 states is any match for a corporation that has more revenues and more private profits than many of the countries or states that we’re talking about put together. So I want to come back to inequality, corporate power and the sort of initiative that I think we have to get much more serious about. We can regulate ourselves as much as we can and engage in no end of fights with these guys about who is more for free speech.

I think it’s a losing battle, frankly. I think that what we need to see is more legal action to break up monopolies of the sort that Lena Khan was pursuing in the Biden administration. It’ll be interesting to see what she does collaborating with Zora Mamdani in New York as New York becomes like Ireland, a tech hub for some of these media companies. But I think that at the end of the day, we’re going to need to grapple with the ownership of these companies and the size of them. And I really don’t want to end these conversations, Mike, without talking about Bernie Sanders American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which is just one example of a different approach to regulation. Rather than regulating these companies, let’s put 50% in this case, he proposes 50% of their stock assets into a sovereign wealth fund for the American people.

I think you could go further. I think you could find other ways of breaking up these huge corporations. They are running, let’s not forget, on our intelligence. It’s not artificial intelligence, it’s human intelligence, it’s ours, it’s stolen. And we not only deserve some profit from the wealth that they’ve stolen from us, but we have some right to control. And I just don’t think there’s a way to regulate companies as big as these. Not when it comes to where they put their big box stores, not where it comes to how much of our data they siphon up and how they use it. So I’m sorry to come on sounding such a naysayer to the Europeans. I think they’re doing the best thing they can. But if it’s little us versus enormous monopoly, both of them, it’s an unfair battle. In the 1800s, in the 19th century, we had massive fights to break up monopoly business at the level of manufacturing.

We are in a new economy now and we need to have those fights all over again for our sake, for the sake of our intelligence, our democracy, and for our planet. Because the other front of this conversation is these AI companies and their use of our water and air and land to process the data that they’re taking from us at no charge stealing.

Michael Fox: Absolutely, Laura. Absolutely. And I think this is interesting because it’s something that Mark Steier and I have talked about in the past about the time of antitrust and the breaking up of monopolies and how important this is and how we have to come back to this. What’s terrifying for me right now is we’re actually seeing the consolidation of media companies. Yeah,

Laura Flanders: We’re going in the opposite direction.

Michael Fox: Exactly. But that is where we need to be. And I so appreciate you bringing that back and tying this in, particularly as we near the close of this conversation.

Laura Flanders: And honestly, I don’t want to dismiss the importance of those regulations pass by Europe. They are important. They did make a difference. You can tell they made a difference because they scared the heck out of the companies. Microsoft, Google, they all freaked out. So clearly there is some bite to their bark, but I think the bigger problem is inequality and control.

Michael Fox: Yeah, absolutely. Laura, I want to just mention some closing thoughts that have been really important for me in doing this episode and also kind of closing thoughts because this is in a way kind of one of the last episodes of this podcast series. And so I have a couple things that I want to mention and I’m so glad to be doing this with you today. But first I want to go back to Barcelona and back to Cerco Villenueva. So he’s the communications professor I spoke with at the top. And he said something that I think is really important. And this is particular in terms of understanding fake news and disinformation and why it’s so complicated and why it’s so hard to push back on and why it’s so powerful for Trump of others on the far right is he said that it’s hard to combat it because it generates an emotional response.

Sergio Villanueva: This automatic answer is very difficult to train. So some author will say, yes, we can train that by education. I think education has a small part to do, but we need to be aware of how our brain works. So we need to have cognitive science knowledge.

Michael Fox: So he says we have to train our mind around this. We need to live in a constant state of skepticism. And that’s hard. And he told me this just beautiful metaphor, Laura, that’s used by the American psychologist, Jonathan Hate.

Sergio Villanueva: Jonathan Hate explains that our brain is like an elephant that has a jokey. A jokey that writes the elephant. So the automatic brain is the elephant and the jokey is difficult to manage to direct and to drive an elephant. And that jockey has to use a lot of energy to make rational cognitive processes. So I would say that try to train your jockey to be constantly active.

Michael Fox: And that’s kind of like what we’re seeing in terms of trying to handle the amount of fake news. And that’s why it goes so viral so fast. The other thing he said, Laura, is that it is not all bad. Social media is not all bad. The new media ecosystem is not all bad. And I really, as someone who has a teenage daughter and who is trying to grapple with social media means today and having worked on this entire podcast, it was important for me to hear this. So he says young people are living in a different media ecosystem.

Sergio Villanueva: And we cannot teach them how to navigate because we don’t know how to navigate in their ecosystem. So it’s a mutual learning process and we have to be very open to be taught by them.

Michael Fox: Now some youth are actually using AI, using social media in these creative ways to build new stories, to build new myths, new waves of understanding morality. But oftentimes we’re just not seeing it. Maybe we’re not on the same platforms or we’re not following the same stuff because everyone is kind of in their own silo. But there’s this one example that he gave and this is about the Puchina avocado. Have you ever heard of this?

Laura Flanders: No, I’m dying to hear.

Michael Fox: Okay. It is crazy and it’s hilarious. So basically in recent days after he told me about this, I went online and I started looking. It’s mainly on TikTok and they’re all these little one or two minute stories or tales that all start off with the legend of the Puchina avocado. And this is all in Spanish. And so people create their own AI videos. And it could be like I watched one that was like the legend of the Puchina avocado and the football game. And it’s like creating these tiny little myths. And they’re hilarious because they’re clearly done to be funny, but they also have these moral underpinnings. And it’s fascinating because people, they see it and then they copy it and they make their own. So there’s done with AI, there’s done with other forms of AI, these images. And you see this little avocado walking on a football field or little avocado.

It’s crazy, but they really are creating this whole new system of stories.

Sergio Villanueva: And you get into it and you get into a whole world. Histories that are cross values, new heroes, new heroines, new anti-heroes that we are not aware. Yeah, it’s crazy. And I guess this is in Spanish. In English, there are other similar phenomenon like this.

Michael Fox: And it’s really, really beautiful.

Laura Flanders: So how about this, Michael? Instead of a ban on under 16s on the internet, how about we have a ban on over 16s? We can listen, we can learn, but we can’t put more stuff up there. Wouldn’t be good for our businesses you and I, but hey, we could take a pause. I think we might learn something and we might learn something beautiful. How do you spell puchaina?

Michael Fox: P-U-C-H-A-I-N-A. I can send you a link and I will put a link in the show notes to where people can find this. It’s really cool. It’s really cool. The one other thing I want to mention today is one of the things that I’ve really gotten from this whole experience researching, investigating and working on this podcast over the last year, Laura, is how much we are increasingly living in a divided world and that powerful people like Trump and those in Silicon Valley use that division for their gains. It’s us versus them. And that more and more, what I come back to is the need for us to find common ground, to find our common place to return to our society, kind of what you were talking at the top. Democracy is about us being able to listen to each other and having conversations not always agree, but also disagree.

And for me, no one’s asked me what my definition of free speech is in this podcast just yet, but what I – Free speech, Michael. Thank you, Laura. Thank you. What I come back to, for me, free speech, we need to be able to listen. Free speech does not work if we’re not listening. And I mean, I feel really strongly about that. After a year, we have to have the right to speak our voice and we should be required to listen as well. And there is something that I think was really beautiful and really profound from my conversation with Sata from Finland because she talked about this concept that they put in their policy. It’s actually included in their policy booklets around media education, media literacy. And it’s a Finnish concept called. I know I did not pronounce that right and I apologize for those in Finland.

It’s similar to apparently the German concept of buldung and there is no real translation for it in English, but the idea is it’s a holistic process of self-cultivation.

Saara Salomaa: But also with Civistis comes also the kind of tolerance. It doesn’t mean that you would accept everything, but you understand that there are different points of view and different perspectives to many aspects.

Michael Fox: She says, for them, it’s like this key aspect of democracy because facts are important, but they can be used and they can be biased. But Civisti needs to always ground us in society. It’s the way we have to relate with each other in the world. It’s empathy. And I saw it described in one place as a kind heart and a critical mind. And I really like this idea as something to grasp or strive for, to ground us particularly now in this insane world as people are being pushed aside as a way for us to ground us and something to try and bring us together.

Laura Flanders: I for many, many years have used a sign off that I think speaks to exactly that. And recently I had it written on my arm because I felt that I needed to be reminded. And it was simply stay kind, stay curious, which is a lot of what I’m hearing there. And I think you’re right, it’s listening, it’s pausing, it’s empathy using that empathy muscle. I think that as we think about our education process, there’s media literacy, there’s comprehension. We need the arts. We need the arts that encourage people’s imagination and to use their imagination to think themselves into other people’s reality so that maybe there’s a moment of pause between the inhale, oh my God, scary thing and an immigrant did. I’m being told on the internet. And exhale, therefore I should go out. What should I do? Wait, maybe I should think about that.
Immigrant, does this make sense? We need those pauses. So I love this idea and I love this series, Michael. You’ve done a wonderful year of work and you and Mark did an amazing thing. And thank you so much for letting me be part of it here at the tail end. It was a pleasure and a privilege.

Michael Fox: Thank you so much, Laura. I really apreciate it. And it’s such an honor and a pleasure speaking with you today. It’s been a gem. So thank you so, so much.

Audio Clip: You’re welcome.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Next time.

Marc Steiner: Now the battle for a free speech is more critical than ever. We have to stand up, tell the stories we have to tell, put it out there in every medium we can find and fight for the right to speak our minds, which will be taken away from us if we don’t. That’s what we face right now.

Michael Fox: Next week I’ll spend the entire hour with my co-host, Marc Steiner. He was with me for the first three episodes and in so many ways his life has represented the epitome of what standing up for free speech should mean. Civil rights activist, community organizer, educator, journalist, radio host. For most of his 80 years, he’s been speaking truth to power and I can’t wait to bring you this exclusive finale to this podcast series. That’s next week on the Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app, leave a review and tell a friend. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer and sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting in the United States or across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to everyone I spoke with today in the show notes and a huge thanks to Laura Flanders. It was really a pleasure having you on the show. I’ll add a link to her show, Laura Flanders and Friends, also in the show notes.

Finally, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you’ll never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The battle for free speech is a production of The Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.