Free Press

Free Press is a national nonprofit media-advocacy organization that campaigns to give people a voice in the decisions shaping their media — challenging corporate consolidation, protecting free speech and press freedom, advancing racial equity in media systems, and holding media and technology platforms accountable for algorithmic harm. Founded in 2003, it operates through a dual structure: Free Press (501(c)(3)) for research, education, and charitable advocacy, and Free Press Action Fund (501(c)(4)) for full political lobbying and electoral engagement. Neither entity accepts funding from corporations, governments, or political parties. Its campaigns have produced two of the most consequential platform-accountability outcomes in U.S. civil-society history: the 2015 FCC Open Internet Order classifying broadband under Title II, and the 2020 Stop Hate for Profit advertiser withdrawal from Facebook — more than 1,200 advertisers pulling spend and compelling structural concessions on civil rights oversight and algorithmic racial bias from the platform.

Founding and structure

Free Press was incorporated on August 14, 2003, founded by media scholar Robert W. McChesney, journalist John Nichols, and activist Josh Silver, working initially from a small office in Northampton, Massachusetts. McChesney had spent the prior decade building a public-intellectual critique of commercial media concentration; Free Press gave that critique an organizational vehicle and a grassroots-mobilization infrastructure. Craig Aaron assumed the role of president and CEO in April 2011. Jessica J. González — formerly executive vice president and general counsel at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and three years as Free Press's vice president of strategy and senior counsel — became co-CEO on January 15, 2020, and co-led Stop Hate for Profit's Facebook advertising boycott. The MacArthur Foundation awarded nine grants totaling $4.6 million to Free Press between 2022 and 2025 for journalism advocacy, civic media capacity-building, and local-news working groups.

Save the Internet and net neutrality

Free Press's first landmark campaign was Save the Internet, launched in 2006, which assembled an unusually broad coalition — the Christian Coalition, the ACLU, and the Gun Owners of America among its organized participants — to defend network neutrality at the FCC. The coalition drove more than 2 million people to speak out at the FCC across multiple rulemaking flashpoints over a decade, contributing to the 2015 Open Internet Order classifying broadband as a common carrier under Title II — the regulatory designation Free Press had demanded from the campaign's inception. Save the Internet became a template for mass-participation regulatory-comment organizing in digital-rights advocacy: demonstrating that civil-society mobilization at scale could shift a major administrative proceeding even against intensive industry lobbying.

Change the Terms

In October 2018, Free Press co-founded Change the Terms with the Center for American Progress, Color of Change, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more than 40 civil-rights, anti-hate, and open-internet organizations. The coalition released a suite of recommended content moderation policies for internet companies, designed to deny hate groups the online organizational infrastructure they use to recruit, fundraise, and coordinate violence — while protecting free speech and net neutrality. Change the Terms was the first major civil-society coalition effort to specify, in policy-document form, the precise algorithmic amplification and content-moderation changes platforms were required to make, and its framework served as the baseline that Stop Hate for Profit and subsequent advertiser-pressure campaigns invoked when naming their demands.

Stop Hate for Profit

In June 2020, Free Press co-organized Stop Hate for Profit alongside the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Common Sense Media, LULAC, Mozilla, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and Sleeping Giants. The campaign demanded advertisers withdraw spend from Facebook in response to the platform's algorithmic amplification of hate speech, voter suppression content, and white nationalist organizing. More than 1,200 advertisers paused their Facebook spend in July 2020 — directly targeting the revenue stream constituting approximately 98.5% of the platform's income — and Facebook announced two structural concessions: a senior civil rights oversight role inside the company, and a dedicated team to study algorithmic racial bias. Both had been standing demands of the civil rights coalition that Facebook had previously declined to act on. Stop Hate for Profit is the movement's reference model for the advertiser-boycott strategy: converting a movement-side complaint about algorithmic amplification into a concrete brand-safety procurement decision by engaging the advertiser stack rather than the user side.

Stop Toxic Twitter

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, Free Press organized Stop Toxic Twitter, pressing major advertisers to cease spending on the platform as Musk reversed content moderation policies, reinstated suspended extremist accounts, and reduced the platform's trust and safety infrastructure. The campaign applied the Stop Hate for Profit advertiser-boycott model to a second major platform under rapid-response conditions, demonstrating that the coalition and accountability infrastructure built in 2020 could be redeployed against a new platform ownership structure with documented content moderation rollbacks.

AI, privacy, and surveillance

Free Press designates Artificial Intelligence, Privacy & Surveillance as a formal focus area alongside media accountability, journalism access, and internet freedom. In November 2023, Free Press Action released Insatiable: The Tech Industry's Quest for All Our Data, a research report examining the data-collection practices of Bluesky, Mastodon, and Meta's Threads — the major Twitter-alternative platforms — and calling for robust federal privacy protections against extractive data collection and profiling.

On May 28, 2026, Free Press and the Disinfo Defense League launched Solidarity Over Surveillance, a campaign joining 24 civil-rights, press-freedom, and digital-rights organizations — including the NAACP, Fight for the Future, Freedom of the Press Foundation, GLAAD, Reporters Without Borders, and Muslim Advocates — to resist the expanding apparatus of corporate and government AI-powered surveillance. The campaign targets data brokers selling sensitive user information to law enforcement, AI companies marketing surveillance tools as crime-prevention infrastructure, and government weaponization of domestic-terrorism authorities against communities of dissent. Its tactics include community education, open-records training to expose government surveillance partnerships, and local mobilization against extractive data center construction — organizing civil-society resistance to AI surveillance infrastructure from platform policy down to municipal land use.