We support the following appeals:

• People’s Principles To End Mass Surveillance

• An Internet for the Common Good: Engagement, Empowerment, and Justice for All. A Community Informatics Declaration. By Michael Gurstein. (see also: How can we achieve Internet Justice ?)

Key Quotes

"Free speech is a tool to discover truth. Content moderation is a tool for engendering social cohesion. You can optimize for truth or social cohesion, but you can’t optimize for both.

Some people say “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach” to imply that we can have both, but that misunderstands free speech. As Antonio Garcia Martinez says, “Speech without reach isn’t free speech; it’s just mumbling to yourself.”

When people critique free speech they often attack the strawman version of the idea. They complain that “absolute free speech” will lead to chaos and harm — but the conversation isn’t about allowing absolute free speech. We have 231 years of case law that determine acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech, including harassment, slander, etc. The question isn’t ‘should we allow absolute free speech?’ The question is instead: ‘should the free speech laws that regulate our government also regulate our companies, especially if they’re increasingly becoming the public square?’ "

- Erik Torenberg [1]

"Granting autonomy to someone in the name of freeing them is still an exercise of power. It is still a sign-al of dominion over those who you just freed. As someone with power over another, you can not give freedom to others, the most you can do is be the cause behind someone’s not being unable to express their freedom. Thus, freedom can not be given to another, only taken away from another or expressed as oneself. We can not be pushing anyone through the door to their freedom lest our pride of being the one who frees takes over."

- Crypto Law Review [2]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Aral Balkan: On the Necessity of Protecting our Extended Cyborg Self

Key Books

• On Internet Freedom, by Marvin Ammori [3]

"In this short volume, available as a DRM-free ebook, the established First Amendment scholar and longtime digital rights advocate Marvin Ammori takes on the question of why everybody should care about keeping the Internet free. Along the way, he explains how online battles like the SOPA protests have helped shape our understanding—and the reality—of our online rights." [4]

Key Videos

• Ayishat Akanbi on the Importance of Free Speech

Key Quotes

"The whole "rights discourse" presupposes an external authority (government, courts) to enforce those rights, which essentially "creates the "liberal space" of "freedom" and "rights" -- but is silent on the terms of community members' engagement with each other and shared ideals. Hence the "freedoms" of the liberal/modernist/market state but also the anomie and isolation: there is no juridical language for recognizing or supporting the commons. But worse, the state doesn't even uphold putative rights in an even-handed, reliable way."

- David Bollier (email, August 2014)