liber-net is a digital civil liberties initiative focused on free speech, censorship and privacy. We pay special attention to both Big Tech and government censorship, noting that they often collaborate with civil society actors who advocate for speech controls. These controls are typically framed under the guise of combatting disinformation, hate speech, or child safety. While we recognize these as real problems, they also serve as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to repress legal speech.

Founded in early 2023, our first initiative was working with leading independent reporter Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files. Together we mapped what came to be known as the Censorship-Industrial Complex, and CEO Andrew Lowenthal published Twitter Files on Australia’s Covid censorship, the censorship of RFK Jr., and collaboration between anti-disinformation NGOs and the security state. Since then, our work has expanded to help coordinate the Westminster Declaration free speech manifesto, build a network of pro-free speech dissidents from the progressive digital rights field, conduct deep-dive investigations into U.S. federal funding to anti-disinformation initiatives, and map Germany’s censorship network.

You can find our work here and our media appearances here.

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Leadership

Andrew Lowenthal (CEO) is a writer, researcher, and advocate. He is the co-founder of EngageMedia, a progressive Asia-Pacific digital rights and open technology non-profit which he led for more than seventeen years. He is a former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Film Studies Center, and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

He writes on Substack at Network Affects, and tweets at @naffects.