The article is here; the introductory paragraphs:
The internet is the latest in a long line of communications technologies to have enabled greater freedom of speech. From the printing press to the radio to the television and the cell phone, technological advances have made it possible for more people to express themselves, share news, and spread ideas. At every stage, speech has been further democratized, empowering people who could not previously make themselves heard and challenging the influence of the traditional gatekeepers of public information—including the state, the church, politicians, and the media. These advances have often been met first with excitement and enthusiasm, followed by a public backlash fueled by a mix of legitimate concerns about the impact of technology on society and moral panic stoked by the vested interests whose power has been challenged. In time, these pendulum swings have come to a resting point through a combination of the normalization of the technologies in society, the development of commonly understood norms and standards, and the imposition of guardrails through regulation.
The internet has enabled the most radical democratization of speech yet, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a phone or computer to express themselves, connect with people regardless of geographical barriers, organize around shared interests, and share their experiences across the world in an instant. Over the last two decades, social media and instant messaging apps have turbocharged internet-enabled direct communication—and have exploded in popularity. More than one-third of the world’s population uses Facebook every day. More than one hundred forty billion messages are sent every day on Meta’s messaging apps, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
These technologies have made it possible for grassroots movements to grow rapidly and challenge established authority and orthodoxy, and in doing so, change the world—from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo. A decade ago, sociologist Larry Diamond called social media a “liberation technology.” Without the ability of ordinary people to share text, images, and video in close-to-real time, and to have it amplified via networks of people connected through social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the groundswell of public support for these causes and others would never have been possible. Social media also made it possible for millions of spontaneous grassroots community-based initiatives to start and flourish during the emergency stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to help the vulnerable or celebrate frontline workers, and for millions of small businesses to stay afloat and reach customers during lockdowns.
It would be naive to assume that connection inevitably leads to progress or harmony. The free and open internet is not a panacea. With hindsight, the techno-utopianism of the Arab Spring phase of social media was never going to last. But the pendulum has now swung far the other way, as it has done in the aftermath of previous technological advances, to a phase of techno-pessimism, with many critics decrying social media as the source of many of today’s societal ills. This backlash has led us to a pivotal moment for the internet. Politicians around the world are now responding to the clamor with a new wave of laws and regulations that will shape the internet for generations to come.
The radical liberalization of speech enabled by the internet brings its own set of issues and dilemmas: from what to do about the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and other forms of “bad” speech, to a range of novel issues around privacy, security, well-being, and more. These challenges are worthy of lengthy analysis and discussion in their own right—and they are the focus of other essays in this volume.
It is right that policymakers the world over are grappling with the many challenges the internet presents and beginning to establish a new generation of guardrails intended to mitigate the potential harms. But if we accept as our starting point that, for all the downsides, empowering people to express themselves directly is on the whole a positive thing for societies, and that this has been enabled by the open, borderless, and largely free-to-access internet, then we must not take it for granted.
In its early days, many thought that the internet’s distributed architecture and multi-stakeholder governance model would be enough to keep it open and free. It was thought that the web was by design a technology that evades control by any single state or organization—an idea perhaps best captured in poet and political activist John Perry Barlow’s end-of-the-millennium manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” As he rather grandly put it: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Alas, this idealism has proved to be misplaced. Events in recent years have demonstrated that the internet’s design is not enough to guarantee protection from government control.
The clash between borderless open communication and authoritarian top-down control is one of the greatest tensions in the modern internet age. Authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes have demonstrated over and over that when they want to quash dissent, one of the tools they use is the internet. They often try to do two things: 1) censor what their citizens can say, and 2) cut their citizens off from the rest of the global internet. And, as we have seen firsthand at Meta, to do these things they target the use of social media and messaging apps by their citizens….
