Over time, the First Amendment has meant lots of different things to a lot of different people. In this episode, with University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier by her side, host Evelyn Douek travels back to the time when modern free speech doctrine first started to emerge. Together they consider the values that have influenced how America thinks about free speech and how these values came to shape the way American law approached regulating the internet back when very few people even knew what the internet was. We hear from someone who was there—Sen. Ron Wyden—now one of the most famous names in internet regulation—about Section 230—one of the most (in)famous online speech regulations out there. But things have been changing in the politics of online speech regulation, and things are really starting to get weird now.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.