Her name is Yona Faedda. In mid-January, she was detained in eastern France. Her crime? Organizing a small group to support recent protests in Iran and to oppose World Hijab Day.
A part of a wider feminist movement that opposes mass migration, this 21-year-old university student and other young French women dressed in hijabs and went to a terrace in Lons-le-Saunier.
They asked other French people if they were “afraid this might be what France will look like in 50 years,” Faedda told the Deseret News.
Then she was stopped by the police. They searched her, took her into custody and accused her of “undeclared demonstration.”
“Except we weren’t demonstrating at all,” Faedda said. “We had no slogans, we had no signs, we had no banners, we weren’t calling people over ... We were just wearing hijabs and asking questions to people passing by.”
French police kept Faedda in a cell for five hours. It didn’t seem like they understood why she was there. When an investigator came back to her cell, he said they were going to keep and search her phone, “on the orders of the prosecutor.”
It may seem an insignificant moment, but Faedda’s detainment matches a wider crisis that has spread across the West. New limits are being placed on free speech and freedom of expression — especially for those who speak against the grain.
When did the free speech slide begin?
Many Western countries believe the way to harmonious societies in a fractious age is through speech restrictions, Paul Coleman, the executive director of Alliance Defending Freedom International and author of the book, “Censored,” told the Deseret News.
Many European countries began adopting speech laws after World War II to undergo “denazification” and prevent Holocaust denial.
But in the past 15 years or so, speech restrictions have accelerated and expanded to include discussions of race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
In 2026, hate speech laws are designed to prevent people from insulting each other, disinformation laws are designed to prevent people from spreading untruths, and digital services laws are designed to prevent people from accessing harmful material, he explained.
However well intentioned these new laws were in their creation, “the devil is in the details,” Coleman said. European speech laws “are all extremely, vaguely worded, they’re very subjective in terms of how they’re drafted, and that allows authorities to arbitrarily enforce these laws in line with their own political worldview.”
“And that’s exactly what we’ve seen happen,” he said. “And so really, the lesson of history is if you give people in power broad, vague, subjective powers to restrict speech, then over time they will use those powers to restrict speech that goes against them.”
When Europe sets the precedent for speech censorship, it carries the danger of normalizing censorship for governments around the world, Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, told the Deseret News.
It’s not just European countries that struggle to promise free speech to all. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many other countries around the world are watching their laws that uphold freedom of expression deteriorate.
The First Amendment is not ‘magical fairy dust of freedom’
The U.S. has not been exempt from the desire to restrict the speech of others.
For instance, in the summer of 1964, TV repairman Clarence Brandenburg joined a group of about 20 other Ohio residents for a Ku Klux Klan rally. The white-hooded group burned a cross, and Brandenburg gave a speech.
In footage taken by a Cincinnati TV station, Brandenburg spewed overtly racist and antisemitic content, then threatened the government. The state of Ohio convicted him of “advocat(ing) . . . unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political form.”
Brandenburg was sentenced to one to ten years in jail and was fined $1,000.
After filing an appeal, his case was picked up by the U.S. Supreme Court. They ruled that “a state may not forbid speech” unless it directly incites or produces imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
Brandenburg v. Ohio now serves as a landmark case for courts defending Americans’ First Amendment right to speech.
“It’s important to recognize that all of the countries in the Western world have similar provisions (to the U.S.) in their constitutions protecting freedom of speech,” Coleman said. “So the First Amendment doesn’t serve as some magically worded fairy dust of freedom.”
He continued, “It’s really been the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of what that means consistently over the last half century that has made the difference.”
Online safety laws vs the internet
The internet has brought “a glorious but chaotic quality to free speech,” JD Tuccille, a contributing editor for Reason Magazine, told the Deseret News.
Since the world wide web went public in the ‘90s, “we’ve seen countries react to it, try to accommodate it and in recent years crack down on the flow of information that digital media represents,” Tuccille said.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act, the U.K.’s Online Safety Act and Germany’s Network Enforcement Act all work to restrict hate speech, but they’ve had a blanketing effect.
As Taylor Lorenz reported in The Guardian, the U.K.’s OSA has blocked Sponge Bob Square Pants gifs, Spotify playlists, posts recruiting Britons to the socialist Your Party and more.
Laws like these are “not necessary in order to have a multicultural society,” Tuccille said. The laws reveal leaders’ “obsession” with social control and mitigating conflict between groups, he said.
Lorenz echoed this sentiment. While protecting kids online seems like a great idea, “these laws set the stage for authoritarian censorship,” she wrote.
The distinction between private and government regulation
“There’s a misunderstanding on the distinction between a private actor and government regulation,” Huddleston said.
Much like how bookstores choose the books they sell, private companies should be allowed to choose their own content moderation policies, she said.
Huddleston referenced the market response to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022. “Folks dissatisfied with Twitter or Facebook can turn to Bluesky or Truth Social,” she said. “We need to recognize the difference between a private company making a decision and the government forcing an individual company to carry or not carry certain information.”
“Let the free market work,” Huddleston said.
Where do we go from here?
In her conversation with the Deseret News, Faedda echoed the French Enlightenment writer, Voltaire. Freedom of expression “is the essence of democracy,” she said.
As the world has become more polarized politically, “there’s a concerted effort to silence those who don’t think the way ‘political correctness’ dictates,” Faedda said.
She added, “We can talk less and less about immigration, insecurity or Islamization in general, and at the same time, no one in the government wants to do anything to change it, and people who want to make a change are being silenced.”
When asked about the future of free speech in her country, Faedda said she was optimistic.
“I think things will get worse before they get better. I think we’re really going to reach a breaking point. We’re going to go all the way down the slope, but after that, people will… people will start to wake up. Once we’re at the very bottom, people will truly wake up, rebel and save their country," she said. “I hope.”
Translation from French for this article was done by Ben Christensen