China, AI and the West's Free Speech Crackdown

Over the past three years, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people has become a flash point for freedom of speech in the West. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians has given Western governments an excuse to crack down on dissenters. There has been intimidation and job insecurity at one end of the scale, through to brutal policing, arrests, and extraditions at the other. Our guest on Downstream this week knows a thing or two about censorship. Artist Ai Weiwei holds the unusual position of having been censored in both China and Europe. In conversation with Ash Sarkar, they discuss how rising authoritarianism in many Western nations represents a fragility at the heart of the liberal political project.

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