In a world of mounting censorship, it’s never been more important to protect every person’s right to speak. Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free society—there’s little meaning to an electoral system if we can’t speak our mind to one another and to our representatives. It’s also a fundamental human right, guaranteed by the First Amendment and every major human rights treaty around the world.

Responding to this rising threat, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), where I serve as legal counsel, recently launched a new litigation team, the Center for Free Speech. ADF’s mission in creating this dedicated team of attorneys is to defend every person’s right to free speech and to hold the government and powerful corporations accountable when they unlawfully censor or punish speech.

This new era of censorship calls for innovative strategies. A complex international web of shadowy government actors, nonprofit groups, and for-profit corporations are colluding to stop speech they don’t like, invoking buzzwords like “misinformation” and “disinformation” as their pretext for viewpoint-based restrictions. We will stop unlawful censorship while preserving the fundamental rights of individuals and organizations.

My team’s efforts will include suing private-sector censors who are working with the government or abusing their power to suppress or deplatform disfavored speech. There must be consequences for governments and government proxies that participate in the corrupt Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC).

The coordinated push of government, universities, think tanks, NGOs, and private businesses bleeds into almost every major industry and part of life. When entities or people are deplatformed, debanked, blacklisted, or refused business for their speech because the government has enlisted private sector participation in engaging in unlawful censorship, that is government corruption and must be stopped.

In Brazil, a justice on the country’s Supreme Court suspended the social media platform X across the country after the company declined to censor certain voices. The justice’s order spoke of the “real danger” posed by X of influencing the electorate with “massive misinformation.” Once a government begins using such vague criteria to censor messages, it opens the door to widespread suppression of speech.

But it’s not just happening in Brazil. The U.S. Department of Justice pressured Facebook, Twitter, and Google into silencing dissenting voices on a wide range of hot-button cultural issues, including climate change, abortion, economic policy, gender identity, and COVID-19 policies. Big tech companies collude with the government to censor viewpoints they don’t like.

We’ve already begun to litigate several cases under the umbrella of the Center for Free Speech including a pair of cases where we’re suing the state of California.

In The Babylon Bee v. Bonta and Rumble v. Bonta, ADF represents popular satire website The Babylon Bee, attorney and blogger Kelly Chang Rickert, and video platform Rumble. One of the laws our clients are challenging is AB 2655, passed by the California legislature earlier this year. The law requires large online platforms to become state censors by sometimes labeling and other times taking down posts with “materially deceptive content” about elections.

And in Studnicki v. Sage Publications, we represent several doctors who published multiple papers in a peer-reviewed medical journal on the dangers of abortion drugs. After the publisher received complaints about the authors’ pro-life affiliations, Sage retracted these articles and even removed one of the authors from the journal’s board of directors.

Defending free speech is nothing new to ADF. We’ve won landmark free speech victories before the U.S. Supreme Court and have been especially prolific on public university campuses as its Center for Academic Freedom has secured more than 400 victories protecting students’ free speech rights.

Government agencies and powerful private actors – or worse yet, a combination of the two – are using vague buzzwords as an excuse for censorship. The outgoing administration spent the past four years relentlessly attacking our constitutionally protected freedoms and unlawfully extending executive power.

But we cannot expect the entrenched censorship apparatus to unilaterally disarm. And we must insist that the new administration dismantle the CIC instead of trying to wield it for its own purposes.

That means calling balls and strikes, especially when President-elect Trump hangs a curve with a nominee like Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General, who previously “commend[ed] Mark Zuckerberg for taking action” against so-called vaccine misinformation on Facebook.

It’s critical that the Republican party keeps its avowed commitment to free speech. The new administration has a great opportunity to lead the defense of our First Amendment rights. If the majority of current nominees do what they claim they want to do, there is reason to be hopeful.

Through pioneering legal strategy, ADF will tear down the Censorship Industrial Complex and preserve free speech in the new frontier of our digital age. We will ensure that ordinary people worldwide have full clarity on their free speech rights and are empowered, without fear, to expose any government or its agents attempting to undermine them.

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Logan Spena serves as legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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Combating The Rising Threat Of Censorship In 2025