Four Principles for Digital Expression (You Won't Believe #3!) by Danielle Keats Citron, Neil M. Richards :: SSRN

We need clear principles to guide and secure meaningful digital free expression. This article charts a path to provide just that. Part I exposes crucial myths surrounding the digital speech and privacy in our networked age. Part II offers a conception of free speech based on a distrust of power, both public and private. Even if doctrinal analysis does not account for private barriers to free expression, the project of free expression should. Part III lays out four essential preconditions for a theory and a system of free expression in the digital age. These preconditions are substantive and procedural. They require legal intervention and extra-legal efforts. They draw some inspiration from due process guarantees and some from commitments to equality. Underlying these principles is a unifying normative commitment: If we want to ensure that our commitment to long-standing democratic theories of free expression survives its translation to the digital environment, we need to take a long, hard look at the digital public sphere we actually have, rather than one that we might want or one that has been advertised to us by Silicon Valley.