Suzanne Nossel headshot

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Every Friday, we discuss tricky questions about free speech and expression with our CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, in our weekly PEN Pod segment “Tough Questions.” In this week’s episode, we talked about this past Tuesday’s Virtual Gala and some of the biggest names in free expression it celebrated, the rewarding experience of the fight for human rights at PEN America, as well as the implications of the recent U.S. government lawsuit against Facebook for disinformation and online harassment.

It’s Gala week here at PEN America. On Tuesday, we celebrated some of the biggest names in free expression—among them, Barack Obama. While we had to convene virtually, it marked the biggest gathering in our history. Suzanne, I think most organizations can hope for one or two big names at their annual gala—not to brag, but I think we had more than I could count: Barack Obama, Darnella Frazier, Patty Smith, Marie Yovanovitch, Bono. I’m wondering how, taken together, these honorees represent what it is that PEN America stands for.
Well, it was an all-star lineup. In addition to those, we had Madeleine Albright, Spike Lee, cameos from Cory Booker, Meryl Streep—it was pretty extraordinary. That’s some of the magic of the virtual world: it’s a little easier to pull people together than it is to get them all to New York City, on the same night, in front of the red carpet. We miss being in-person, but for us, our mission and notion of free expression is one that is encompassing. I think that was reflected this week at the Gala, having an honor for Xu Zhiyong—we always give an award to a writer who is in prison at the time of the ceremony. It is an ingathering where everyone is standing up for this person, and you have all of these writers—whether it’s together in a room or tens of thousands united on Zoom—standing up for this individual. You’re associating this individual, who is stuck in a prison cell somewhere, with the other luminaries. They’re an honoree alongside President Obama, which is an unusual kind of designation for that person to get.


“Marie Yovanovitch had this long career as a distinguished diplomat, working through the ranks, keeping her head down—if you’re a career official in the foreign service, you don’t get ahead by stepping out or, particularly, going out of step with the administration that you’re serving. She’d serve Democrat and Republican administrations, served under many presidents, and then there came a moment when President Trump went after her. She could have just gone silent and shut down, but instead, she came back swinging on behalf of American values and all the things she had been trained in.”


I’ll never forget the story of Ahmed Naji, who was our Freedom to Write honoree a few years ago. He was describing how he was in a prison cell in Egypt with 30 or 40 other men, and one of the highlights of every day was when they would get the newspaper—it would be brought in. Then, there was one day when the newspaper didn’t come, and they were asking their guards, begging for it, and they wouldn’t give it to the men, the incarcerated men. It was because the story of the Freedom to Write honor was all over the papers, and they didn’t want to motivate, excite, and embolden the political prisoners in Egypt by knowing that they were not forgotten—that Ahmed was receiving this award. So, that award is a very powerful one.

I think this year’s two Courage Award winners, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and the 17-year-old Darnella Frazier—the young woman who took the cell-phone video of the murder of George Floyd—were both kind of emblematic of courage in very different settings, but their acts are similar at their essence. Marie Yovanovitch had this long career as a distinguished diplomat, working through the ranks, keeping her head down—if you’re a career official in the foreign service, you don’t get ahead by stepping out or, particularly, going out of step with the administration that you’re serving. She’d serve Democrat and Republican administrations, served under many presidents, and then there came a moment when President Trump went after her. She could have just gone silent and shut down, but instead, she came back swinging on behalf of American values and all the things she had been trained in. She was fearless—she knew this White House was being dictative, that if she crossed them, they would come after her. This was well before the election—we could have been dealing with another five years of President Trump—and that administration could have made her life incredibly difficult with lawsuits and other forms of harassment. Yet, she stood up there very bravely and put her hand up to testify in front of Congress about what she had witnessed.


“If you think about those 10 minutes of Darnella standing there, what would it have taken for a police officer to turn in her direction and see that she was capturing these devastating last moments of George Floyd’s life, with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck—to just turn on her, to shove her, to go after her, to grab her cell phone?”


Then, Darnella Frazier—totally spontaneous action by somebody who was not trained, not schooled, was just going on instinct and sheer guts in the moment to step up and say: “Holy moly, I am witnessing something unusual here, and I better see how this unfolds, and you know what, I’m going to capture it, just in case.” That “just in case” ended up triggering a huge worldwide movement. If you think about those 10 minutes of Darnella standing there, what would it have taken for a police officer to turn in her direction and see that she was capturing these devastating last moments of George Floyd’s life, with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck—to just turn on her, to shove her, to go after her, to grab her cell phone? So in those two acts, you have such different women, at different stages of life, different walks of life, but united in just sheer spine and grit, and this made it a really powerful evening.

I want to go back to one thing you said. We talked about the Freedom to Write honoree. This year it’s Xu Zhiyong, the dissident writer, and the prior ones—that part of the magic of the Gala is often that they’re next to these other luminaries. One of the things that I was so struck by was how our former PEN president and Pulitzer-winning biographer, Ron Chernow, in his interview with Barack Obama asked the former president: “Do you hear when we make clamor? Do you hear our voice? Do you hear writers and readers globally when they are calling out for the freedom of a dissident like this?” He said it makes all the difference. Did it buoy you, or did it make you feel like the world’s highest leaders are listening to what we and our colleagues in the human rights space are doing?
Look, I have served in government, so I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the pressure from civil society and the NGO sector on human rights issues. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, in a good way, which is that you have this sense that you have some access to the levers of power, the ability to speak out as the U.S. government, to mobilize the United Nations, to try to activate allies around the world to do something, and to get a senior official to take the case directly to a foreign counterpart.


“There’s something about individual cases of dissidents—these are human stories, faces, and individuals with families and life trajectories. When you can help them, it’s so concrete. . . They’re just a face in a photograph, and you feel like you know them, because you’ve told their story—we’ve made a film about them, we’ve talked about them, we’ve written signs, posters, and petitions about them. Yet, they are sort of this frozen face that you know is languishing in their prison cell somewhere. And then, we have the experience of them coming to life—they actually walk through the doors of our office, greet us, and tell us what it was all like.”


So if you care about these issues—which President Obama does and, certainly, I do—when someone brings a case to your attention, it lights this fire where you feel pretty compelled to try to see what you can do. I think it is a very powerful mechanism, and there is a certain moral weight that the civil society sector in our country brings. It’s not unique to the United States, but we have this incredibly vibrant universe of organizations that are expert, well-informed, and at different times have had the ear of government officials, and it can be a very powerful nexus.

So to hear him reflect on that, talk about how proud he was to have raised these cases with individual foreign counterparts—Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin—and how he actually secured the freedom of individuals, was quite remarkable. I think there’s something about individual cases of dissidents—these are human stories, faces, and individuals with families and life trajectories. When you can help them, it’s so concrete. The favorite part of my job is the occasions where I have gotten to meet some of the people who, often, we’ve honored at the gala. They’re just a face in a photograph, and you feel like you know them, because you’ve told their story—we’ve made a film about them, we’ve talked about them, we’ve written signs, posters, and petitions about them. Yet, they are sort of this frozen face that you know is languishing in their prison cell somewhere. And then, we have the experience of them coming to life—they actually walk through the doors of our office, greet us, and tell us what it was all like. Going to Sundance with Oleg Sentsov, welcoming Liu Xia, the wife of Liu Xiaobo, when she was finally freed from house arrest, and others, are just some of the most inspiring moments that really keep you going with this work, and I think Obama shares a sense of that.


“We know that content has rallied people around—things like the anti-lockdown protests, Facebook pages that they ultimately shut down because they were so based on false information. So I think it’s important, as the suit unfolds, to be clear-eyed about what it potentially will and will not solve. When it comes to the content issues, it probably isn’t the remedy. Maybe, if ultimately there’s some sort of breakup, there are more players that can enter the sphere so that the algorithmic power is more distributed and there’s more competition of ideas. That’s possible, but that would be many years away. So questions about what we do regarding the harms of online content exist in the here and now.”


Finally, Suzanne, I just want to change gears briefly. This week, the U.S. government, and 48 states and districts sued Facebook, accusing it of abusing its market power to quash competition. It could lead to Facebook having to spin off its really popular products, like Instagram and WhatsApp. What implications do you think this action will have for issues that we’re focused on, such as disinformation and online harassment that have really proliferated on platforms like Facebook?
That’s a great question, because people are so frustrated with the platforms, and they’re grasping for solutions. One that is so resounding and forceful that people glom onto is to break them up. I think breaking them up may or may not be justified. The antitrust authorities are going to examine that in the context of the suit, but it’s not clear that even the remedy that is sought—which seems to be undoing the transactions whereby Facebook acquired WhatsApp and Instagram—would really make much difference when it comes to the principal concerns that we as PEN America and many others have with the platforms, which revolve around disinformation, online harassment, and other harms of online content. WhatsApp is a private messaging platform, so it doesn’t really serve as a superspreader of disinformation, foreign propaganda, false information about elections or about, for example, coronavirus vaccines. Even Instagram has not been a primary platform for that.

But Facebook absolutely has been. We know their algorithms accelerate and supercharge the most incendiary content and, often, content that drives right into political fissures and schisms that have deepened polarization. We know that content has rallied people around—things like the anti-lockdown protests, Facebook pages that they ultimately shut down because they were so based on false information. So I think it’s important, as the suit unfolds, to be clear-eyed about what it potentially will and will not solve. When it comes to the content issues, it probably isn’t the remedy. Maybe, if ultimately there’s some sort of breakup, there are more players that can enter the sphere so that the algorithmic power is more distributed and there’s more competition of ideas. That’s possible, but that would be many years away. So questions about what we do regarding the harms of online content exist in the here and now, and that is certainly, at the very least, no panacea, if it makes any difference at all.