Free Internet

In 2012, a reporter asked Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian what he imagined Americas Founding Fathers would have thought of his company. A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? Ohanian replied. I would love to imagine that Common Sense would have been …

MANILA, PHILIPPINES—In a white-walled room, a small cyber-army of four is furiously typing. And posting. And clicking. And scrolling. And trolling. For the next eight hours, they will be glued to their screens. They are hired guns in one of Manila’s hundred…

MANILA In a white-walled room, a small cyber-army of four is furiously typing. And posting. And clicking. And scrolling. And trolling. For the next eight hours, they will be glued to their screens. They are hired guns in one of Manilas hundreds of troll fa…

Not too long ago, conventional wisdom held that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone. The remedy for hateful and offensive remarks, that 1990s-vintage argum…

Don’t use these VPNs in Hong Kong. According to new reports coming out of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Hong Kongs current status as an autonomous and open region is coming under an increasing amount of pressure.  Independent observers have ra…

The internets instant access to information is crucial for education, spreading ideas and activism. This makes it a significant threat to authoritarian governments, leading many countries to strictly censor websites, content, and communication. But, which cou…

Twitter has a new flagging system which will be used in order to suppress public figures found in violation of Twitter’s arbitrarily enforced terms of service. Matt Bracken and Vlad Tepes discusses the fate of the free internet, and what you can do to prepar…

After a barrage of scandalselection meddling, the spread ofmisinformation, and the implementation of discriminatory algorithmsSilicon Valley is quickly losing the publics trust. Washington, in turn, has responded with aggression. The House Judiciary Committee…

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, recently wrote a widely discussed critique of the company in The New York Times. He observes that Mark Zuckerberg once claimed that Facebook was just a social utility, a neutral platform for people to communicate what the…

Last year, leaked plans for “Project Dragonfly,” a China-focused Google search product, triggered a fierce backlash within and beyond the company against proposed censorship and surveillance functions, and the unusual sidelining of the companys privacy and se…