Is anyone going to defend free speech online?

This was a pretty bad week for free speech, huh?

Disney suspending Jimmy Kimmel’s show was a wakeup call for a lot of people and occupied most of the headlines and attention. But Kimmel isn’t alone. Journalists, teachers, government employees, and people from all walks of life have been punished and censored for expressing anything other than slobbering praise for conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk in the wake of his death.

Elite institutional capture has been on full display since Kirk was shot last Wednesday. The biggest news outlets were some of the first employers to fire people for speaking the truth, which is terrifying. As journalists, we’re tasked with writing the first draft of history. It’s crucial that we can document the reality of someone’s life and legacy, regardless of how we feel about them or how they died. But instead, journalists have been muzzled at a time when we need them the most. You see the same dynamic unfolding in academic institutions, cultural institutions, and offices of public service.

Right now, the main place you can go to get unvarnished information (or God forbid, jokes) about Kirk is social media. I’ve seen viral memes and documentation about Kirk’s activism and beliefs across all major platforms this week. It’s not the first time that social media users have bested legacy institutions at accurately and fairly delivering the news to the most people—Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Project 2025 are two other news stories I saw more about from everyday people online than trusted U.S. sources of authority, which is really sad. We deserve a better news infrastructure and incentives for reporters, but this is what we have instead. And soon, we might lose that, too.

One thing I haven’t seen people freaking out about enough over the past year—and especially now that Donald Trump’s administration has quadrupled down on limiting speech—is how the internet is being censored in front of our very eyes, with restrictions on speech coming into effect and materializing on a daily basis.

Here’s just one example of the type of weekly news dispatch you get when you pay attention to free speech online: Republican representatives in Michigan just introduced a bill to ban all “pornography” online. That bill explicitly defines anything about trans people as being prohibited, conflating trans identity itself with porn, which is also an explicit aim of Project 2025. It also seeks to ban some ASMR videos—which, as a former ASMRtist myself, I can confirm are not inherently pornographic and are often made by children.

Now, let me take a step back here: porn shouldn’t be banned in general. Porn is protected by freedom of speech and it’s an important part of society and culture whether you like it or not (but let’s be real, most people do). But even if you do think porn should be banned, which I would vehemently argue with you on, you probably don’t think all trans people should be wiped from existence or that information about how to get an abortion should be scrubbed or that women should be banned from Instagram for showing their bare shoulders. And if you do believe that, you’re probably FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and you should GET OFF MY BLOG!

This Michigan bill is in its earliest stages of consideration and isn’t likely to succeed. But it’s one of dozens of similar pieces of legislation at the state and federal level, some of which can and has passed and will go into effect with devastating consequences. We’ve already seen it happen. And worse, a lot of tech platforms are complying in advance.

This legislation isn’t usually called the “We’re Going to Censor the Internet” bill. It’s usually called something like the “Kids Online Safety Act,” which is real proposed federal legislation. Many of these bills undermine Section 230 and/or attempt to keep children from viewing porn and/or other loosely defined “harmful” material (like queer and trans content) via age verification. Now, we don’t have time to unpack all that, but here are some simple truths for navigating tech policy: Age verification doesn’t work and it threatens our privacy and freedom. Policies to “protect” kids are often excuses to restrict freedom for everyone. And censoring the internet doesn’t keep kids safe—it actually endangers them more. 

I understand why most people don’t know about or engage with this stuff. I didn’t, until I started covering tech policy intermittently as part of my job at NBC News. And I learned really quickly that the field is full of big money bad actors, largely driven by big tech itself, who are committed to using this kind of legislation to concentrate power and control over the internet for profit in a way that benefits authoritarian leaders like Trump. That’s why all the big tech CEOs were so cozy with him at his inauguration and why Elon Musk isn’t getting hauled in front of Congress to explain extremism on his platform, even though it’s one of the biggest offenders. In fact, a lot of tech policy about “protecting kids” like KOSA is co-signed by Musk, whose platform regularly endangers children, because he knows this isn’t actually about curbing child exploitation at all. 

When I started covering KOSA and other tech policy, I also learned that there are a lot of people operating in the space out of good faith intentions to actually protect kids, but they’re falling into big tech traps and wind up supporting legislation that will hurt kids more. When you see grieving parents of kids who died by suicide supporting KOSA, it creates a powerful rhetoric incentive to support KOSA. But KOSA will sever the internet lifelines that actually keep a lot of marginalized kids going. 

In the wake of Kirk’s death, there have been even more stark advances toward a future where we can’t post freely on the internet. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, has reignited efforts to undermine Section 230, which is the legal foundation that allows user-generated content on the internet to exist. Her involvement is yet another reminder that these efforts to curb internet speech may ultimately benefit conservatives, but they’re being engineered and pushed in a bipartisan fashion. It’s one of the most frustrating aspects of this, actually, because elected Democrats are working overtime to seal their own fate in a future where they won’t be allowed to exist. 

Take TikTok as an example. Trump was the first president to support banning the platform, but Joe Biden’s administration and Democrats in Congress actually pushed that effort over the finish line right before Trump re-entered office. They ignored all the voices—of experts and their own constituents—begging them not to do it. They had no excuse not to understand how the efforts to ban TikTok would help Trump in the election and then solidify his state media machinery after he won. 

Yes, banning TikTok was Trump’s idea to begin with, but in the crucial lead-up to November he reversed course and promised to “save TikTok,” which greatly endeared him to millions of voters. Sure, Trump and all those voters were largely behaving in a hypocritical and misinformed way. That’s the American electorate and Republican Party for you! Democrats have no excuse not to understand this! Not only was Biden blamed for briefly banning TikTok, but Trump’s administration flouted the law to keep the platform running under his leadership, and now TikTok is getting sold to Trump’s billionaire allies to probably become another version of Musk’s X. Great work, team. 

One of the reasons I feel the need to write about this is because it feels like no one is fighting back against one of the biggest threats to our very ability to fight back. In fact, the rhetoric around social media is largely anti-social media, like people think it will somehow be a good thing if the government forces us off our devices so we can go play outside with each other. We are living through fascism, folks, and the primary way we connect with and inform and organize with each other is under lethal attack. No one is coming to protect the internet for us, and I worry that people won’t even have a clue how catastrophic this can become until it’s over. 

We need more reporters who are covering this issue regularly and straightforwardly, without kowtowing to conservative rhetoric and big tech companies in the process. There are already some people doing great work, including my fiancée (and unofficial newsletter editor) Anna Iovine and my friend Taylor Lorenz. And shoutout to Mike Masnick and Techdirt, Sam Cole and 404 Media, and Adi Robertson and The Verge. Also, the whole team at WIRED. Beyond journalists, we need more people to get informed and use their platforms to speak truth to power on this issue before it’s too late.

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