Who Gets to Speak? An Interview with Knight Institute Research Director Katy Glenn Bass
With mass protests on college campuses, debates on social media restrictions, and recent court rulings, the state of free speech across the nation has become increasingly uncertain. In this interview, Content Editor Madeline Senate sits down with Katy Glenn Bass to examine how freedom of speech has evolved over recent years and what the future holds for First Amendment rights. Glenn Bass is the Research Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, an institution which serves to defend First Amendment rights by supporting legal cases, conducting research, and advocating for free expression. Glenn Bass has organized several symposia examining how discussions surrounding free speech have evolved in the modern day. In this interview, which took place on November 14, 2025, Glenn Bass shines light on the current state of freedom of expression and First Amendment rights regarding social media, universities, and mass protests.
Madeline Senate: You’re currently working as the Research Director of Knight First Amendment Institute, but you began working to protect freedom of expression with PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free speech and press with a focus on writers and journalists, in 2014. How has the conversation regarding free speech changed over time in your experience? Do you feel like progress has been made in the fight for First Amendment rights?
Katy Glenn Bass: Since 2014, the prominence of First Amendment issues and free speech issues globally have increased a lot in terms of salience. It seems in some ways that almost every political fight we’re having in this country relates to free speech in some way.
I think the importance of free speech rights and the value of free expression has become more apparent over those years. In terms of whether there has been progress made, I think we’re really in a battle for the soul of the Constitution right now, so progress is a hard thing to describe. However, I would say that I think people are really aware of how important these rights are, both for themselves and for our society more broadly.
MS: With the Knight Institute, you’ve put together multiple research initiatives focusing on recent technological developments, such as platform algorithms and artificial intelligence. This new technology has drastically changed the structure of public discourse, and it will continue to change the way people continue to discuss politics in the future. Do you feel like technology has allowed for a greater freedom of expression, or alternatively, has technology hindered freedom of expression in other ways?
KGB: This is a complicated question because right now, everyone is very aware of the harm that new technologies are posing to free expression. If you asked this question 10 or 15 years ago, I think you would have gotten much more optimistic answers from people who work on this. There was a lot of hope that the internet and global connectivity were going to bring about a new wave of democracy and free speech around the world.
Now, we’re seeing the bottom of that cycle where everyone now thinks that technology is enabling authoritarianism and sending us into the darkness—and there’s some truth to both of those things. However, technology has also been really wonderful for dramatically expanding people’s access to information. People now have the ability to inform themselves and listen to people from anywhere in the world in a way that was not possible before the internet.
I share people’s concerns about some of the side effects of these new technologies, but I also still think it’s been a really enormous development in terms of people’s ability to organize. The internet has ushered in new ways for people to learn from one another and find information that they might want to explore on their own.
MS: In your experience, how have these technological developments changed the way that scholars view and debate constitutional issues?
KGB: Now, so much of our speech happens on privately owned platforms. As you know, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were primarily written with the government in mind as the chief source of danger to those rights, which makes sense because the internet did not exist in the 18th century.
However, all of those rights and the court framework that has been built up around those rights really view the government as the problem and main infringer of rights. Now we have this new environment where almost all communication happens on platforms owned by companies, not by the government.
Those companies’ decisions have a real impact on our freedom of speech and our ability to express ourselves, but they’re not government actions. So, in some ways, the First Amendment doesn’t have a lot of work to do there. But, then you also have this second layer to look at where the government is trying to influence what those companies do. The government is putting pressure on them to take down certain speech or not take down certain speech, or criticizing platforms for being biased towards one political view or another.
Therefore, technology has changed a lot about the way we think about where the threats to free speech are coming from and what can be done about them.
MS: On the topic of the responsibility of these private platforms, the issue of misinformation on social media has been a highly debated topic in recent years. While some feel as though social media platforms bear the responsibility of fact checking and limiting the spread of false information, others argue that this would pose a threat to freedom of speech. This debate has even culminated in legal challenges, such as in Murthy vs. Missouri, where Missouri and Louisiana sued the US government for having social media platforms remove posts related to the pandemic. What role do you believe social media platforms play in enforcing the accuracy of information?
KGB: There’s two things to consider here. One is the role that social media platforms should play in terms of their social responsibility, or their responsibility to their users. The other category is how effective they are at doing what the users of that platform want them to be doing—and those are not the same question and they don’t necessarily lead to the same answer.
On most platforms, users would prefer that the platform be doing something to try to remove inaccurate information, at least about really important things like public health messaging, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. That’s what the Murthy case was about in part.
Most users don’t like thinking of the social media platforms they use as vectors of misinformation and disinformation. However, for many years, we’ve also seen platforms that have tried to make an effort to do this. There was more of this in the past, but now, most platforms have stepped back from the idea that they should be really policing the factual nature of information on their platforms.
Yet, I think their ability to do that is more questionable. The amount of information that’s being posted on these platforms and shared on these platforms every second is really hard for the human brain to even fathom. It’s just so much information, so platforms are really limited in their capabilities to police information. Even if that’s a role that we want them to play, the technological realities of these platforms makes it hard for them to do that accurately. They can either overshoot and they take down too much stuff, including stuff that I think most people would not consider to be factually inaccurate, or they undershoot and they leave up a lot of stuff. Then, people see the stuff on the platform and think, “Wait, why is that there? That’s crazy.” It’s a hard problem.
MS: Do you believe that it’s possible to strike some sort of ideal balance between overshooting and not having enough fact checking?
KGB: I think this is one of those things where the users of the platforms are probably the ones best positioned to ask for that. They can use their own ability to exit that platform if they don’t like the way it is operating.
One example of this is the platform X. Once Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, a number of users left the platform because they didn’t like the new decisions that were being made by new leadership about content moderation and about the kinds of accounts that they were hosting online. I’m sympathetic to the fact that there are only so many options on social media. There are not an endless number of platforms to use, but one thing that holds promise is newer platforms like Blue Sky where users have more control over moderation decisions—like what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. Things like that are the way forward.
MS: Beyond the digital sphere, the censorship of free speech has been especially relevant to higher education. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives universities speech climate grades to measure free expression on campus, which is based on student surveys, campus policies and speech related controversies. Columbia University received an F in the speech climate. In your opinion, is this a fair assessment? What benchmarks need to be met for this assessment to change?
KGB: I can’t really speak to the FIRE grade because I don’t know that much about the methodology they use to come up with those scores, but I think for many campuses across the United States, their record on free expression has been pretty dismal over the last few years in terms of cracking down on particular kinds of expression.
In terms of applying rules differently to different speakers or actors, one of the most important benchmarks that I would highlight going forward is for private campuses—not public universities or state schools. They have a lot of leeway in terms of the law and the sorts of rules they want to set for expression on campus.
However, whatever those rules are, they should be informed by First Amendment values and they should be applied fairly and equally across the board. If you can’t do that, then you deserve the failing grade.
MS: To what extent do you believe that private universities should have more leeway in managing free speech as opposed to public universities?
KGB: It’s a matter of how the First Amendment applies differently to public schools versus private schools, but in general, I would say that private schools should look to the principles of the First Amendment for making rules: don’t discriminate on the basis of viewpoint or on the basis of content, apply those rules fairly, try to maximize free expression values. You want to try to accommodate as much speech and debate and expression on campus as possible. Those things are all encoded in the First Amendment, and that is where I would point private universities when setting their rules.
MS: While universities are aiming to maintain their academic freedom and allow for pure freedom of expression, they’re also facing growing pressures to moderate this expression according to political sentiments. Columbia and other universities have been heavily criticized in recent years for their policies on free speech and agreements with the Trump administration. Do you view educational institutions more as perpetrators of censorship, or actors which can lead the fight against it?
KGB: I would take a step back and look at where the pressure is coming from. As critical as the Knight Institute and I have been of universities that have settled with the administration, I must underscore that it is entirely inappropriate and unconstitutional for the government to be putting this kind of pressure on universities in the first place.
That is the main problem. The Trump administration is doing this by withholding federal funding, which is vital for the massive research apparatuses that exist on most of these campuses. They’re putting these universities in a pretty much impossible position. If you fight in court, it may take years to resolve and you have to gamble that it will go in your favor—even though I think you do have a strong First Amendment case there. You either have to live with the fact that you may not see that funding for years or you have to bend to the enormous pressure from your own community and government to cut a deal so that you can get that money back and the university’s research operations can continue. That’s a completely unfair position to put any university in.
One thing that has been really unfortunate about the last few months is that so many schools have been really reluctant to press for their rights in court. There have only been a very small number of universities that have tried to sue over this withholding of funding as a lever for pushing universities to agree to the administration’s terms.
The First Amendment law is very much in the university’s favor in these cases, but courts take a long time to decide issues, and then there’s appeals to go through. Most schools can’t live with multiple years of interrupted funding. I think they’ve been put in a really hard place. However, for the most part, I would have liked to see more resistance from those universities than we have seen.
MS: If we look at patterns spanning across the whole country, there have been numerous cases that suggest that the US may be experiencing democratic backsliding and decreasing the constitutional rights of US citizens. The US was added to the Civics Monitor Watch list, which is a list of countries that have experienced decreased civil liberties. Do you feel like this claim rings true regarding the current state of rights in the US?
KGB: Yes, unfortunately, I think it does. It’s also something that many scholars of democracy and authoritarianism have noted as well: we’re clearly in a moment of backsliding.
MS: Can you elaborate more on what this backsliding looks like in the US?
KGB: It’s this onslaught against all sorts of speech and sites of opposition to the administration. One reason they are going after universities is because universities are sites where effective resistance would form. But you’re also seeing it in terms of their attempt to bring pressure on all sorts of private institutions: the attacks on the media and the frivolous lawsuits against major media outlets. Those outlets have then decided to settle rather than fight in court where their First Amendment rights would have been vindicated.
Across the board, it’s an attempt to superimpose an authoritarian power structure on our democracy. Yet, I will also say that for all of the surprising capitulation that we’ve seen at the elite level by traditional media outlets that have settled lawsuits that Trump has brought and the universities that have signed settlement agreements, one thing that is giving me a lot of hope is that you are also seeing a lot of popular resistance—not necessarily on the elite level, but the massive protests that we saw last month and the election results that we got last week. There are a lot of reasons to think that normal everyday people in this country do not like what is happening, understand what is at stake and the importance of their rights, and are doing what they can to push back.
MS: In addition to popular protests, how can you see this country moving forward in the future to address all this backsliding?
KGB: It’s going to be a long road, but I think protest opens the space for further action. Protest in and of itself is a way of showing people that you are not alone in being upset about what’s happening and disagreeing with it. It also creates moments for people to organize communities and give them a next step, whether that is knocking on doors for a political candidate or starting to organize for change in their local communities. I think we’re already seeing that happen everywhere.
I think elections continue to be a really important part of this. Voting is not everything, but it’s a significant part of a democracy. We’re now about a year out from the 2026 midterm congressional elections, so supporting whatever candidate really speaks to you the most and doing what you can to volunteer for them is another way forward.
I also think that continuing to stay informed and educating yourself on what is happening by talking about it with your own network of friends and loved ones is another thing that we can do together. Regarding long-term rebuilding, it will be years at least. It will be a long time before we’ve managed to repair all of this damage and some of this is going to have to happen through new legislation to better protect our rights from this kind of dangerous pressure from the government. This can be a way to curb the government’s powers and ability to make those sorts of threats, which is something that I hope a future Congress will take up.
Katy Glenn Bass demystifies the current uncertainty regarding the state of First Amendment rights in the US by outlining the impact of new technology and social media in both expanding and limiting free speech. While acknowledging the difficult choice that many universities have faced in recent years due to the unconstitutional pressure they have experienced to acquiesce to the current administration, Glenn Bass remains critical of the lack of broad resistance by universities and media outlets against government pressure. Yet, she points to widespread protests and recent election results as a positive sign that it may be possible to fight against the current democratic backsliding. Glenn Bass offers hope in the fight to protect constitutional rights through the potential for citizens to mobilize and vote.
Madeline Senate (CC ’29) is a staff correspondent at the Columbia Political Review majoring in Political Science on the Pre-Law track. Madeline spent the past fall working on the Virginian gubernatorial race, during which she attended her first (and second) political rally. You can contact Madeline at ms7430@columbia.edu