Free speech, privacy, and human autonomy are under assault. Under the cloak of countering “misinformation,” governments, NGOs, academics, and Big Tech now collaborate to suppress information, ideas, and opinions expressed by everyday people. Meanwhile bio-metric ID systems are being built to control people’s movements and access, and digital currencies threaten citizen’s basic right to economic independence.

In a strange twist, many of those who defended our digital rights now lead this new authoritarianism. Recent revelations show many NGOs partner with government and Big Tech to promote top-down information controls - with some even seeking to break encrypted private messaging. During the Covid-19 crisis, rather than defending and protecting human rights from government abuse, many in the digital rights field cheered on and even collaborated to dismantle our rights and freedoms.

liber-net combats this new authoritarianism in order to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age. Through writing, research, media-making, events and network building, liber-net provides a platform to create alliances, shine a light on civil society corruption, and change the conversation.

Our past work includes working with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files and mapping the Censorship Industrial Complex (https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b) and with Michael Shellenberger to develop the Westminster Declaration (https://westminsterdeclaration.org/)

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