Freedom From Censorship: Inside The Battle To Build A Second Internet

It was just above freezing on Capitol Hill the night of Jan. 8, when Twitter banned President Donald Trump from messaging his nearly 90 million followers.

The censorship of a sitting American president by unaccountable and unelected billionaires in California was a dangerous escalation, but here in Washington, Democrats were overjoyed, most Republicans were relieved, and the corporate press was ecstatic. To even question the decision publicly in D.C. was to support an imagined “insurrection.”

That night, as friends and I discussed the damage done and the battles ahead around my kitchen bar, we foresaw a world where these kinds of sweeping actions would become common to the point of mundane, losing any fig leaf of justification along the way. As the hours wore on and the beer animated our discussion, one of our company, Martín Avila, sat aside and said little.