A year ago this month, Stanford Law School hosted a little-noticed meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. It took place in the faculty lounge, where participants were sustained in their deliberations by bagels and fruit platters. Among the roughly two-dozen attendees, the most important were a group of fresh-faced tech executives, some of them in t-shirts and unusual footwear, who are in charge of their companies’ content policies. Their positions give these young people more power over who gets heard around the globe than any politician or bureaucrat—more power, in fact, than any president or judge.

Collectively, the tech leaders assembled that day in Palo Alto might be called “the Deciders,” in a tribute to Nicole Wong, the legal director of Twitter, whose former colleagues affectionately bestowed on her the singular version of that nickname while she was deputy general counsel at Google. At the dawn of the Internet age, some of the nascent industry’s biggest players staked out an ardently hands-off position on hate speech; Wong was part of the generation that discovered firsthand how untenable this extreme libertarian position was. In one representative incident, she clashed with the Turkish government over its demands that YouTube take down videos posted by Greek soccer fans claiming that Kemal Ataturk was gay. Wong and her colleagues at Google agreed to block access to the clips in Turkey, where insulting the country’s founder is illegal, but Turkish authorities—who insisted on a worldwide ban—responded by denying their citizens access to the whole site for two years. “I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country,” she told me in 2008. The other Deciders, who don’t always have Wong’s legal training, have had to make their own guesses, each with ramifications for their company’s bottom line.

The session at Stanford concluded with the attendees passing a resolution for the formation of an “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group,” then heading over to Facebook’s headquarters to drink white wine out of plastic cups at a festive reception. But despite the generally laid-back vibe, the meeting, part of a series of discussions dating back more than a year, had a serious agenda. Because of my work on the First Amendment, I was asked to join the conversations, along with other academics, civil libertarians, and policymakers from the United States and abroad. Although I can’t identify all the participants by name, I am at liberty, according to the ground rules of our meetings, to describe the general thrust of the discussions, which are bringing together the Deciders at a pivotal time.

As online communication proliferates—and the ethical and financial costs of misjudgments rise—the Internet giants are grappling with the challenge of enforcing their community guidelines for free speech. Some Deciders see a solution in limiting the nuance involved in their protocols, so that only truly dangerous content is removed from circulation. But other parties have very different ideas about what’s best for the Web. Increasingly, some of the Deciders have become convinced that the greatest threats to free speech during the next decade will come not just from authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran, who practice political censorship and have been pushing the United Nations to empower more of it, but also from a less obvious place: European democracies contemplating broad new laws that would require Internet companies to remove posts that offend the dignity of an individual, group, or religion. The Deciders are right to be concerned about the balkanization of the Internet. There is, moreover, a bold way to respond to that threat. The urgent question is whether the Deciders will embrace it.

At Facebook, the deciders are led by Dave Willner, the head of the company’s content policy team. His career provides a kind of case study in how the Deciders’ thinking has evolved. Now 28, Willner joined Facebook five years ago, working night shifts in the help center, where he answered e-mails from users about how to use the photo uploader. Within a year, he had been promoted to work on content policy. Today, he manages a crew of six employees who work around shared desks at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park; rather than a global hub for content control, their space, festooned with colorful posters, more closely resembles a neater-than-usual college dorm. Toiling under Willner’s team are a few hundred “first responders” who review complaints about nudity, porn, violence, and hate speech from offices in Menlo Park, Austin, Dublin, and Hyderabad, India. (Willner is also married to a fellow Facebook employee who now leads the User Safety team, responsible, among other things, for child protection and suicide prevention; one imagines rather heady dinner chatter.) Facebook had only 100 million users when Willner was hired, compared with the billion-plus it has now. Each day, they upload more than 300 million photos alone; every week, Facebook receives more than two million requests to remove material. (The New Republic’s owner was a Facebook co-founder.)