Hi, it’s Evan from Fight for the Future.

I wanted to share this piece I wrote for TIME Magazine about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and what it means for the future of online free speech and human rights.

Here’s the link: https://time.com/6228045/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-future/

Basically the crux of my argument is this: whether you love Musk or hate him (I'm pretty transparent that I’m not a fan), we need to start reckoning with what it means to build our digital lives on platforms owned by others, whether individuals or multinational corporations. Here’s an excerpt:

The truth is that we will never have meaningful free speech or human rights as long as we’re all digitally landless, paying rent in dollars or data. If we want a modern town square we can leave to our children and our children’s children, we need to build online spaces that can’t be owned or controlled by a single person, with tools to address harm, harassment, and injustice that give individuals and communities power over our own online experience.

Fight for the Future is one of the only non-partisan organizations that consistently fights for online freedom of expression and human rights for ALL. We never back down from our core mission: a world where technology is a force for creativity and liberation rather than tyranny and greed.

There’s a hugely consequential US election tomorrow. Please do your part and go out and vote. Once the dust settles, we’ll send an email with our analysis of what the election results mean for crucial digital rights issues like surveillance, Big Tech antitrust, data privacy, and free speech.

No matter who wins at the polls, we’ll be here, doing what we always do: fighting back against attacks on our most basic rights and civil liberties, and using the Internet to mobilize massive numbers of people to demand privacy, transparency, accountability and freedom online.

Want to help us keep fighting past election day? Become a monthly donor today.

Thanks for all you do,

-Evan at Fight for the Future

P.S. Apropos of … everything, we’re mirroring our org’s twitter account on Mastodon! If there are other federated or decentralized social media spaces you think we should check out, let us know.

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