I’ve fought for a free internet for more than 30 years. Here’s where I think we went wrong, and right.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to lunch with a prominent journalist who wanted to ask me about Wikipedia. I had been general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation for a few years during a time when the online encyclopedia had really taken off in growth and funding. The journalist was curious how Wikipedia remains so information-rich and useful when the rest of the internet is filled with divisive, corrosive misinformation.
The journalist took the more jaundiced view, one I’ve heard many times: that the internet has brought us to the unhappy historical moment we’re now living in, and that the only way to rescue society is to impose more discipline online, through tougher laws and fewer legal and constitutional protections.
I hear this too-much-free-speech argument a lot these days, but I can’t get used to it. For 30 years, I have been a cyberlibertarian or—the term I prefer—an internet lawyer. Sure, I’ve worked on copyright law, encryption, broadband access, digital privacy, data protection, and more. But the roots of my career have always been in civil liberties and criminal law.
In recent years, my views have evolved. I no longer think that tolerance of disruptive speech is invariably the best answer, although, even now, I believe it’s typically the best first response. I also think the too-much-free-speech folks are being shortsighted themselves, because we’ve entered an era in which we need more disintermediated free speakers and free speech, not less.century, most of what we’re referring to when we talk about American free-expression law is only about a century old.
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