In the 1960s, the Free Speech Movement was a rallying cry for students and activists who understood that the right to dissent, argue, and speak freely was essential to democracy. Today, we need a new Free Speech Movement—and not just a retread of the 1960s. A new free speech movement would recognize that both the direct authoritarian power-grabs of the Trump administration, and the power grabs of private monopolist entities represent a significant danger. Trump’s oligarchs—his big tech allies who control the flow of news and information—are themselves an independent threat to open society.
For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was seen as the gold standard for defending free speech. It stood up for the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, and forcefully argued that the principle of free expression mattered more than the content of any particular speech. But in the past 10 years, several critics—including former executive cirector of the ACLU Ira Glasser—have persuasively argued that the ACLU has compromised or even abandoned those values, choosing cases on the basis of a particular substantive vision, instead of fiercely protecting speech regardless of its content.
One of its most notorious missteps came when a high-level ACLU lawyer argued in favor of getting Amazon to ban a book, saying, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” This claim was not just a stupid tweet by an activist; it revealed a fundamental and long-standing misunderstanding of how consolidated corporate power threatens free speech.
In the ACLU vision, private power never poses a risk to free expression. If Instagram wants to suppress Palestinian content (as credible reporting suggested it did), that does not implicate democracy, regardless of Instagram’s market share.
When Biden’s DOJ fought to stop a merger between two book publishing goliaths, recognizing that authors having multiple possible outlets is essential to free expression, the ACLU remained silent. Instead, it has repeatedly filed briefs on behalf of Big Tech, defending Silicon Valley’s freedom to act as unaccountable monopolists, claiming that the state has no right to regulate the design of big tech, even if that regulation would make it more content-neutral.