@sauran3049

5 months ago

It’s really great to be here at Georgetown with all of you today. Before we get started, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that today we lost an icon, Elijah Cummings. He was a powerful voice for equality and for social progress and for bringing people together. Back when I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. And the mood on our campus was disbelief. A lot of people felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. And the toll on soldiers and their families and our national psyche was severe. And most of us felt like we were powerless to do anything about it. And I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, then maybe it could have gone differently. And those early years shaped my belief that giving more people a voice gives power to the powerless and pushes society to get better over time. Now back then I was just building an early version of Facebook for my community. But I got a chance to see my values and beliefs play out at a smaller scale. When students got to express who they were and what mattered to them, they started more student groups, they organized more businesses, and they even challenged some established ways of doing things around campus. And it taught me the lesson that while a lot of the world often focuses on the big events and institutions, the bigger story is that most progress in our lives actually comes from individuals having more of a voice. So since then, I’ve focused on building services that do two things. Give people a voice and bring people together. And these two simple ideas of voice and inclusion go hand in hand. We’ve seen this throughout history, even if it doesn’t always seem that way today. More people being able to share their experiences and perspectives has always been necessary to build a more inclusive society. And it is our commitment to each other that we hold each other’s right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get our way in every debate. That’s how we make progress together. But this view is increasingly being challenged. Now some people believe that giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing people together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes that they think matter is more important than every person having a voice and being heard. And I think that that’s dangerous. So today, I want to talk about why and some of the important choices around free expression that I think that we face going forward. Throughout history, we’ve seen how being able to use your voice, how people being able to use their voice helps people come together. We’ve seen this in the civil rights movement. Frederick Douglass once called “free expression the great moral renovator of our society. He said, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.” Civil rights leaders argued time and again that their protests were a protected form of expression. And one noted that nearly all of the cases involving the civil rights movement were decided on First Amendment grounds. We’ve seen this globally too, where the ability to speak freely has been central to the fight for democracy worldwide. The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most, and when people are finally able to speak, they often use their voice to call for change. In this year alone, people have used their voices to end multiple long-running dictatorships in northern Africa, and we’re already starting to hear from people whose voices had been excluded just because they were women or because they believed in democracy. Our idea of free expression has become much broader over even the last hundred years. Many Americans know about the Enlightenment history and how we enshrined the First Amendment into our Constitution, but fewer know just how dramatically our cultural norms and legal protections have expanded, even in recent history. The first Supreme Court case to seriously consider free speech in the First Amendment was in 1919, Schenck versus the United States. Back then, the First Amendment only applied to the federal government, so states could and often did restrict your right to speak. Our ability to call out things that we felt were wrong also used to be a lot more restricted. Libel laws used to impose damages if you said something negative about someone, even if it was true. The standard then shifted, so that way it was okay as long as you could prove that your critique was true. And we didn’t get the broad free speech protections that we have now until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court ruled in opinions like New York Times versus Sullivan that you can criticize public figures as long as you’re not doing so with actual malice, even if what you’re saying is false. So we now have significantly broader power to call out things that we feel are unjust and share our own personal experiences. We see movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too spread and go viral on Facebook. The hashtag Black Lives Matter was actually mentioned for the first time on Facebook. And this just wouldn’t have been possible in the same way before. Just a hundred years back, many of the stories that people are sharing now would have been against the law to even write down. And of course, without the internet, they certainly wouldn’t have reached so many people. So with Facebook today, more than 2 billion people now have a greater opportunity to express themselves and to help others.

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