Coming together for friendship, worship, play, learning, commerce, protest, governing, mourning, or celebration is fundamental. The desire to be with others is innate; the right to do so is declared universal, and the design of spaces—both physical and digital—to encourage or prevent gathering defines countless professions. At the root of civil society is the need to gather, the right to assemble, the ability to voluntarily associate.

The pandemic of 2020, shelter-in-place orders, and protests against endemic racism have brought new attention to our desire and right to assemble. The object of this attention is legitimate: our abilities to gather together are threatened though many protesters raising concerns in this context have misdiagnosed the cause. Public health directives to manage viral spread by means of sheltering and mask-wearing are not the problem. Street protests are an expression of our right to gather, not a threat to that right. On the contrary, our ability to assemble and gather is threatened by the same combination of forces that have so damaged our experience of free expression: the private, digitized control of the spaces where gathering happens and state limitations on the right to assemble.

Profit-maximizing corporate control of online communications channels has changed who dictates the rules for speech as well as how and where it takes place. Public governance is changing in response, and policymakers, scholars, and activists are retheorizing everything from antitrust to employment law and elections to protect public interests. Efforts over the last three decades to define and protect our rights of expression in digital spaces reveal the magnitude of what’s needed to protect our rights of assembly.

The magnitude of the challenges we face in maintaining our rights to assembly and our rights to free speech is similar, but the location is different. Assembly occurs in person, online, and in the spaces that connect the two. To protect our ability to gather, we first need to reconceptualize time and space.

Read the full article about the right to digitally assemble by Lucy Berhnholz at Knight Foundation.