Preserving Our Mental Autonomy: Freedom of Thought in the Speech 4.0 Era

The proliferation of new technologies paved the way for novel or contemporary methods of propaganda, shifting from traditional methods to computational ones that incorporate psychoanalytic techniques, behavioral microtargeting, personalized content delivery, automated bots, and widely accessible social media platforms. While digitalization aids the society in many affirmative aspects, above-referred tools could also be used by malicious or adversarial actors to manipulate the masses or targeted individuals, disregarding human mental autonomy and dignity. Thus, this doctoral proposal seeks to describe how digital technologies have changed the understanding and methods of manipulation and governmental computational propaganda, why these changed methods have the potential to illegitimately interfere with the minds of individuals and violate their rights to freedom of thought. It also explains why the current freedom of thought framework might be inadequate in the contemporary political speech context. Though the research evaluates different international human rights law instruments and some outlier examples from different jurisdictions comparatively, it limits the scope of its recommendation and final analysis to the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).