“In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible," Zeynep Tufekci writes in our special issue about online free speech. But while the social internet gives everyone a voice, it also has countless ways of punishing people for speaking.

February 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Sean Freeman

An African American writer calls out racist hate speech—and gets suspended from Facebook. A young adult author watches her unpublished novel ignite a firestorm on Twitter before anyone has even read it. A Muslim civil rights attorney self-censors, and then finds herself hoping that a white man will say what she was thinking. A well-known conservative firebrand suddenly becomes one of the biggest targets of far-right trolls. A Google engineer writes a controversial memo, and instantly becomes a villain to one army of online readers and a hero to another.

These are just a few stories—told in the subjects' own words—that capture what it’s like to live and post in this, our corrosive, divisive, democracy-poisoning golden age of free speech.

Magda Antoniuk

HOLLY O'REILLY

Songwriter and activist

On being blocked by Trump, and suing him for it

I had an alert that would go off whenever Trump tweeted, and I would reply to most of his tweets. I think it was a Sunday morning: I posted a GIF of the Pope kind of looking at Trump funny, and my tweet said, “This is pretty much how the whole world sees you.”

After that, my phone was very quiet all day. I thought, well, maybe he’s golfing. Then I came back to my computer in the evening and saw that he had actually blocked me. And I just laughed. I’m nobody. I can’t be more than a gnat to him. I felt incredulous, and then amused, and then concerned, all within moments of each other. Then I started thinking, you know, this is something that shouldn’t happen.

The things that I want to say are directed not just to Trump but to the other people who are on his feed. If they’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh and following Trump’s tweets, then Twitter is at least a place where they can get an opposing opinion. But he’s blocked people who disagree with him. When you look at his feed now, it’s mainly just people who are praising Dear Leader. That’s the part that bothers me. So when the Knight First Amendment Institute contacted me, kind of out of the blue, and asked if I would be interested in talking to them about taking part in a lawsuit against Trump, I said sure. Public officials should not be able to block you on social media.

—As told to Chelsea Leu

Magda Antoniuk

LAURA MORIARTY

Young-adult novelist