In the US, I think about power that comes from, not just the government, but also rich individuals and how they use their money to influence things like free speech, as well as corporations.
I think the best way that we can use our speech is using it to challenge and confront power.
I think those power structures are really present in how we talk about speech.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about all the big money that's involved with shaping speech like the Koch brothers, etc, and how they're influencing the culture wars.
Which is why I think it's really important, when I think about free speech, to think about things like social and economic justice.
Cohn: One of the things that I think the Library Freedom Project is that it's really talking about the ability to access information as part of freedom of expression.
Sometimes we only think about it as the speaking part, the part where it goes out, and I think one of the things that LFP really does is elevate the part where you get access to information which is equally, and importantly, a part of free speech.
I think especially, all of the things that are happening in the world now, libraries are a place where we can really come together around ideas, we can expand our ideas, we can get introduced to ideas that are different from our own.
I think that's really extraordinary and super rare.
Well, I think we're in a really bad position about it right now because, to my mind, there was a too-long period of inaction by these companies.
I think another big failure was Facebook and other companies trying to react to fake news by labeling stuff.
I don't think companies should be making those kinds of decisions about speech.
It's such a huge problem, especially thinking about how it plays out for us at the local level in libraries- like because misinfo and disinfo are so popular, now we have people who request those materials from the library.
Because on the one hand, I think that different environments should be able to dictate the terms of how their platforms work.
They already are, and I think it's a bad thing.
One thing I do think, one reasonable speech regulation, is that I don't think cops should be allowed to lie.
These people, under those conditions, are still pushing for free speech and I think that's amazing.
Then the third one I'll say is, I really try to keep an internationalist approach, and think about what the rest of the world experiences, because we really, even as challenging as things are in the US right now, we have it pretty good.
I stop and think about that a lot, when I think about all the issues that we have with free speech here.
Because I think that those are the conditions that, honestly, most of the world is operating under, and those people are everyday heroes and they need to get their flowers.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Wed, 06 Dec 2023 23:13:05 +0000