Jameel Jaffer is founding executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which promotes the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age through strategic litigation, research, and public education. He previously served in various leadership positions at the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately as deputy legal director, overseeing the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. Over the course of his career as a litigator, Jaffer has argued human rights and civil liberties cases in multiple appeals courts as well as the US Supreme Court; he has also testified many times before federal agencies and the US Congress. His recent writing about free speech and related issues—including government secrecy, surveillance, privacy, and censorship—has been published in The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs.
Previously
If the First Amendment’s protections against government intrusion are a core tenet of American democracy, what happens when the chief regulators of speech are private technolo...