Digital Freedom Forum

Technology was supposed to be the great "democratizer" of our age. The advent of the internet and social media promised to wrench control of information from the hands of a few and distribute it to the many, to air marginalized perspectives, to elevate new views in a meritocracy of ideas, and even to propagate a more open society. Yet, increasingly, that vision is under threat. Technology created for social good is used instead for malicious ends —disinformation campaigns on social media threaten public discourse, facial recognition technologies deepen the hold of autocratic regimes over their populations, and user data is exploited to target individuals for manipulation. The Digital Freedom Forum aims to recapture the original promise of digital technologies to both combat the spread of high-tech illiberalism and purvey a more open world, where free and open systems of governance — and the citizens within them — can thrive.

The Digital Freedom Forum is an effort by private sector leaders, policymakers, academics, and civil society experts to identify solutions to protect digital democracy in the United States and abroad. The Forum, one line of effort in the CNAS-wide initiative on Countering High-Tech Illiberalism, will recommend to policymakers what tools, technologies, and policies can maintain the integrity of digital technologies and defeat their abuse by malign actors.