Speaking Freely: Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he teaches Public Policy, Communication and Information. He is starting a new research center called the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. Over the years, he’s been a tech startup guy (with Tripod.com), a non-profit founder (Geekcorps.org) and co-founder (Globalvoices.org), and throughout it all, a blogger.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*

York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you? 

It is such a complicated question. It sounds really easy, and then it gets really complicated really quickly. I think freedom of expression is this idea that we want to hear what people think and feel and believe, and we want them to say those things as freely as possible. But we also recognize at the same time that what one person says has a real effect on what other people are able to say or feel comfortable saying. So there’s a naive version of freedom of expression which sort of says, “I’m going to say whatever I want all the time.” And it doesn’t do a good job of recognizing that we are in community. And that the ways in which I say things may make it possible or not possible for other people to say things. 

So I would say that freedom of expression is one of these things that, on the surface, looks super simple. You want to create spaces for people to say what they want to say and speak their truths no matter how uncomfortable they are. But then you go one level further than that and you start realizing, oh, okay, what I’m going to do is create spaces that are possible for some people to speak and not for other people to speak. And then you start thinking about how you create a multiplicity of spaces and how those spaces interact with one another. So it’s one of these fractally complicated questions. The first cut at it is super simple. And then once you get a little bit into it it gets incredibly complicated. 

York: Let’s dig into that complexity a bit. You and I have known each other since about 2008, and the online atmosphere has changed dramatically in that time. When we were both, I would say, pretty excited about how the internet was able to bring people together across borders, across affinities, etc. What are some of the changes you’ve seen and how do you think we can preserve a sense of free expression online while also countering some of these downsides or harms? 

Let’s start with the context you and I met in. You and I both were very involved in early years with Global Voices. I’m one of the co-founders along with Rebecca MacKinnon and a whole crew of remarkable people who started this online community as a way of trying to amplify voices that we don’t hear from very often. A lot of my career on the internet has been about trying to figure out whether we can use technology to help amplify voices of people in parts of the world where most of us haven’t traveled, places that we seldom hear from, places that don’t always get attention in the news and such. So Rebecca and I, at the beginning of the 2000s, got really interested in ways that people were using blogs and new forms of technology to report on what was going on. And for me it was places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Rebecca was interested in places like North Korea and sort of getting a picture of what was going on in some of those places, through the lens, often, of Chinese business people who were traveling to those places. 

And we started meeting bloggers who were writing from Iraq, which was under US attack at that point. Who were writing from countries like Madagascar, which had a lot going on politically, but almost no one knew about it or was hearing about it. So you and I started working in this context of, can we amplify these voices? Can we help people speak freely and have an audience? Because that’s one of these interesting problems— you can speak freely if you’re anonymous and on an onion site, etc, but no one’s going to hear you. So can we help people not just speak freely, but can we help find an audience associated with it? And some of the work that I was doing when you and I first met was around things like anonymous blogging with wordpress and Tor. And literally building guides to help people who are whistleblowers in closed societies speak online. 

You and I were also involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, and we were both working on questions of censorship. One of the things that’s so interesting for me—to sort of go back in history—is to think about how censorship has changed online. Who those opponents to speech are. We started with the assumption that it was going to be the government of Saudi Arabia, or the government o