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The internet’s war on free speech

The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors

14 May 2016

9:00 AM

14 May 2016

9:00 AM

The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’.

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