性的暴行は言論の自由の問題だ――メアリー・アン・フランクス教授が語るネット上の性的虐待

Your workflows span systems. Your data should follow. Dun & Bradstreet's context layer delivers verified data across your AI workflows so your AI can reason and you can take action. Give your AI the context that's missing. Visit dnb.com slash trustyourai. Before we start, today's show does involve topics including sexual harassment and assault, both on college campuses and online, which, of course, not pleasant subject matter. So if you aren't up for hearing about that, please feel free to skip this episode. From WIRE, this is The Big Interview. I'm senior culture writer E.J. Dixon, sitting in this week for Katie Drummond. My guest today, Dr. Mary Ann Franks, is a professor at the George Washington Law School specializing in the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. She is also the president and legislative tech policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, where she has spent years fighting online and image-based sexual abuse.

She is a tireless advocate for victims of sexual cyber harassment. Marianne Franks, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks so much for having me on. I would say that I first started hearing the term revenge porn in 2011 or 2012. Well, obviously, technology and how we talk about it has evolved a ton since then. For listeners who aren't as plugged into the work you do, I'm guessing terminology like image-based abuse or deepfake sexual abuse can seem sterile or maybe just confusing. Can you walk me through the evolution of these terms? Like, why is it better to be so formal about how we label them? You know, one of the hardest things about trying to talk about these issues is figuring out the right names for them. So we think about the term revenge porn, which was used widely by the perpetrators of this. It's the kind of term that is very evocative, and people mostly know what you mean when you say that.

But the troubling aspect of it was that it did seem to be the name that abusers were giving this conduct. revenge suggests that there's something that was done wrong by the victim. The term porn was really difficult for a lot of people because they thought of porn as being something consensual as opposed to non-consensual. But it is an ongoing struggle because it is really difficult to communicate what we're talking about clearly without falling into one of these pitfalls of either sounding as though we are blaming victims or sounding as though this is more trivial than certainly it is in reality. Right. And the word porn kind of has functioned historically as a shorthand, but that's also kind of unfair to people who make porn, right? Like consensual porn. This is why, you know, we originally landed on the term non-consensual pornography. That's what we were trying to emphasize was pornography itself, not a moral judgment, but a non-consensual version of that. I often think about the best term as being the one that

the audience that I'm talking to is more likely to recognize quickly and understand what we're talking about. So for the purposes of what we're about to talk about today, what are some good terms to establish here? I think that, you know, that's why image-based sexual abuse does become a good term. Anytime you have a failure of consent at any level of sexual expression or conduct, that's a problem. So we're worried about lack of consent to the actual sexual activity. That's one. Then there's lack of consent to being recorded engaging in a sexual activity. Then there's lack of consent to having that recording distributed. And there is, of course, lack of consent to being manipulated in an image or video, making it seem as though you were doing something that you were not. So just to recap, last month, a former student from Cornell University filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2024, seven members of a school fraternity raped and assaulted her repeatedly over the course of seven hours inside of their frat house.

Of course, that story is everywhere right now. It sparked a national discussion about consent, accountability and safety, and rightfully so. What I'd really like to focus on here, though, is the chunk of Jane Doe's lawsuit that takes place online. Basically, she says early that night in 2024, one of the men who raped her also posted an explicit photograph of her body to his frat Snapchat. group, announcing that she was upstairs and available, which was how other members of his fraternity even knew to enter the room she was inside of. In the most basic way, what makes the Snapchat component of this story worthy of discussion? So many things. Part of what we all know now about the way the message was conveyed was it was a reduction of a human being to body parts, speaking about a woman as though she were her genitalia, right? It's not just the image, although that's a big part of it, but it's also this casual reference to a human being as this thing to be used and a casual reference to a large group of men who then responded,

not by thinking that anything was wrong about any of this behavior, but in fact rushing upstairs to see if they could participate in it. So it isn't just that kind of alleged assault that is happening in real time. It is also the idea that you can broadcast it with the full confidence that not only will no one criticize you for it, but that this will be a further bonding exercise, a further social validation exercise. That's what's really chilling about it. And the Snapchat element of it, how does that sort of add to the depersonalization here? I mean, I think that the Snapchat-specific platform, right, is one that began as a way to encourage girls to send nude photos with the confidence that they would disappear and therefore you wouldn't be worried about them leaking. I think that same mindset kind of really is why the platform has continued to be successful in this sense. It's this idea that it's ephemeral somehow, one that almost gamifies what's happening.

How is the experience of going to college in 2026 in conversation with the work you do? Like, what sorts of stories have you heard about bad behavior on college campuses that make you think, actually, there is a fix for this? We have been hearing about fraternity sexual assault and not just fraternity sexual assault, college assault. That happens in many spaces, many places, and not just on college campuses. It is one of the experiences, unfortunately, that is so common for women in particular that whether they go to college or not, they are very highly likely to experience it all the same. But we do see higher concentrations of especially these group assaults happening in places that are male-dominated like fraternities and like athletic teams. these kinds of experiences really show that when you take several men who have had all the privileges that one might want in a society and you put them together and you put them in an environment where the kinds of things they have been told are special about them may be challenged.

And what I mean by that is college is sometimes the first place where a very privileged male, especially a privileged white male, might encounter the attitude that he is not particularly special or smart or interesting and that it's going to create in that person a pretty pronounced sense of cognitive dissonance. And it's the kind of thing that he is going to want to put out of his mind as quickly as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize and to instrumentalize the very people that he thinks might be representative of his lack of specialness. And so I think that's why you see these male bonding experiences at these highly privileged places in these highly privileged kind of bastions, right, fraternities and athletic teams, that part of what they are told is you are entitled to feeling as though you are the person on top at all times. Yeah, I think one of the things that has really resonated with people about this case was that it took place at Cornell, one of the most highly selective institutions in the country, an Ivy League school, somewhere where you think that something like this quote couldn't happen here.

And I think that that is one of the reasons why this story has lingered for so long and why it's horrified so many people. Just the level of privilege and the level of access to education that these boys have. You would think that maybe they would think twice about speaking publicly or speaking to each other in this way. But education really doesn't insulate anyone from misogynistic behavior at all. And what's interesting at Cornell is whatever punishment was given out, like essays or suspensions, maybe it seemed unfair in the moment to the guys that it happened to, but it wasn't really punishment at all. So are they even really learning a lesson? You know it hard to know yet right with ongoing litigation what all the details are and what exactly happened And we know that there obviously some kind of there there But you know what you were saying about is it surprising that men in the context of these elite sort of educational institutions would not think twice

One of the first viral email incidents that ever happened, you know, early days of the Internet, back in 1995, was actually an email that escaped containment out of Cornell. and it was four Cornell undergrads who had written a list titled, I believe, 75 Reasons Why Women Shouldn't Have Free Speech. And women was followed by a parentheses, bitches. And this was sent around by these four men on an email list, a really early email list at Cornell in 1995, and it went viral. The 75 reasons included, I forget which number it was, but one of them was, if she can't speak, she can't say no. Part of the reaction was, this is shocking behavior. The other reaction was, boys will be boys. This was just a joke. It's satire. They shouldn't have been punished at all. And you even had some individuals saying that this is a violation of free speech and Cornell was violating the First Amendment somehow by punishing them at all and expecting them to apologize. Do you remember any of the other 75 reasons? A lot of them had to do with the fear of a female president.

A lot of them had to do with saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote. There were several others that had to do with if she's performing oral sex properly, she shouldn't be able to speak anyway. What are like some of the First Amendment questions here? You mentioned that there that people were raising First Amendment questions about about that email. Even if this is free speech, now what? I think that, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The First Amendment issue, such that it is, is that private universities are not bound by the First Amendment. and that means that if they say you can't say these things or we're going to punish you for saying these things, it might not be a good idea. We might think that there could be other reasons to complain about it, but it's absolutely false to suggest that it's a First Amendment issue. That's one. And then when we're talking about public universities, even when you do have an institution that has First Amendment obligations, they're not mutually exclusive with your obligations to keep your students safe or to impose discipline according to necessary conditions of,

first of all, anti-harassment and discrimination principles and for keeping general order on a campus. So what I think we've really seen is a deliberate warping of the free speech debate that has really portrayed any attempt to take sexual assault seriously or to treat sexual assault jokes as if they are quite serious. We've seen that as being portrayed as censorship and sensitivity and cancel culture and wokeism and all of the rest of it. It also reminds me of the conversation about deepfakes and the conversation from a few years ago about criminalizing deepfakes. The argument against that from tech platforms was that they didn't want to censor free speech. And it just makes me think, why is the autonomy of women and what they want the freedom to do with their bodies, why is that always what's at stake with the free speech issue? It seems like it's the first thing that's sacrificed when we talk about advocating for free speech. Well, it is interesting, right? When you have a cultural emphasis on, or I would say cultural fetishization,

of an abstract notion of free speech, one thing that it does, of course, is it disembodies the conversation, right? Somehow safety, physical safety, becomes oppositional to this supreme value of speech. And that's troubling enough in itself. But even on the kind of terms of free speech as a debate itself, this really shouldn't have worked because, as has been relentlessly documented over the last few decades, sexual assault has a tremendous silencing effect on victims. It affects not just their bodies and their physical safety, although truly that ought to be enough, but it also means that they can't express themselves freely. We're literally talking about situations where victims of sexual assault are told that they can't talk about what happened to them, that they're the ones who are placed under gag orders, not the person who allegedly assaulted them. We're talking about them having to fear that they're going to be threatened and harassed by either the person they have alleged has attacked them or their friends, And so they withdraw from their classes or they stop participating in activities.

They stop expressing themselves. Sexual abuse is a free speech issue. It silences people. And when we allow sexual abuse to happen with impunity, we are essentially saying we do not care about women's voices. We do not care about the number of women who are going to decide that they can't be journalists anymore or talk about the topics they want to report on because of the abuse and harassment that they're going to experience. or the number of female politicians who are driven out of political office because of some ex-partner who's decided that he's going to take a private moment and send it to everyone. We're saying that we don't care about their bodies or their speech, and that really should be a free speech crisis that we're talking about. More from my conversation with Dr. Marianne Franks after the break. Data confidence isn't optional. When AI is driving decisions and agents are taking action, one bad entity connection or missing relationship can throw off everything.

The Dun & Bradstreet context layer, anchored in the Duns number, delivers the context your AI agents need to operate on facts, not assumptions. That means results you can explain, decisions you can defend, and AI you can scale across your workflows. Learn more at dnb.com slash trustyourai. Something I've really noticed in the last few weeks is this thirst coming from dudes online to learn and reveal Jane Doe's identity. What was it like for you watching this unfold in real time? What was the precedent for it? Like in terms of the other high profile cases you've looked at where Jane Doe's have been doxxed. And what about this case and this particular instance of mass doxing stood out to you as different? Well, in some ways, it was haunting because of how similar it was that we've seen cycles of this.

And not just ones that I've witnessed myself, but ones that have preceded my own experiences. We've just seen it get so much worse. And where there might have been some concern to keep things within certain contexts, right? maybe there was some concern about this breaking containment and becoming a mainstream issue as opposed to an online issue, that no longer seems to be a bar to anyone now. That once it becomes the bloodsport of this is a person whose story has ended up online, the ability to just jump in or the desire to just jump in and become part of it, there doesn't seem to be any sort of countervailing force to say, maybe you shouldn't do that. We really seem to have removed whatever safeguards or disincentives there might have been once, they all seem to be gone now. And it seems to be the opposite. You will get validated. You will get attention. You will be maybe even just lauded for the fact that you, under your own name, are in fact providing this kind of entertainment, this kind of this online mob attack on someone.

And I think that is a little different. There's a kind of guy online who is so wrapped up in like the slippery slope argument around free speech that if we don't protect it at all costs, something much bigger is at stake. Even though the other side of what they're advocating for is exactly what we're talking about. What are these guys missing? It's hard to know where to start with how to answer that question, but they're missing a lot of things. But the free speech argument really has gained this kind of talismanic power, I would say, in the last 20 years. And it is kind of the Elon Muskification, right, of the free speech argument. Because once you had someone like Elon Musk saying, I'm going to bring free speech back to Twitter, I'm going to be the anti-censor, and you see someone with that kind of power and influence do exactly what everyone who has ever made that claim about how I really care about free speech do, which is to immediately ban his critics, to immediately shut down any accounts that were actually making him look bad,

and to elevate things like people who were posting actual CSAM, right, actual child sexual abuse material, and just decide that those people should have a voice. That was really, I think, what gave a lot of people permission, right, to do exactly that, to say whatever terrible self-interested thing I want to do that might be criticized as misogynist or racist, I'll just dress that up and I'm arguing for free speech and I will just get away with it every time. I'll be heralded as the worse I am, the more I'll be praised. And that was true before Musk, but I really do think that there was something about him in particular that just activated that for a lot of people. And now you really can, in so many ways, you can't convince men who are saying the same things that men have been saying forever, right, about gender or about race or about wealth or whatever it is. you cannot convince them that they not free speech heroes that they not just exactly what they seem like mediocrities who seem really upset that their world no longer takes their mediocrity as a sign of genius They are the geniuses that people will ignore

So I think that's a big part of it. One of the things that I was really struck by in watching everybody so gleefully dox Jane Doe, I didn't see any of these tweets doxing the woman that they thought to be Jane Doe get taken down or even have notes appended to most of them despite this policy. Why? I mean, for the same reason the Trump administration does not mean when they say we're going to return free speech, you know, we're going to really fight for the First Amendment. The same reason that that administration will then just quite literally lock up all their enemies and silence assent and shoot peaceful protesters in the street. Because what the loudest defenders of free speech usually really mean is they are going to put in place a system where everything they approve of will have all the freedom possible to be expressed. And anything that they don't approve of, they will mercilessly repress. And that is, it isn't even, it goes beyond hypocrisy. It really is just the absolute conviction that you, the special boy, right, really know what is true and what is meaningful and what is nonsense.

And therefore, when you make the decision that this should be elevated, that you have to resort to that, right, that that somehow is freedom of speech. But any enforcing guidelines against anybody else that you don't like or anybody who's being attacked and that you agree with the attack on them, that you can just let that happen is because you alone can see what is truly free speech and what is not. And that is what is so frightening about those people actually getting control, because for a while that wasn't necessarily the case. Right. When you have someone like Musk have this kind of megaphone and that kind of platform, it really does send a signal to the entire world. This is someone who quite candidly will say, you know, he got Donald Trump elected. He's got all the power in the world. And so when he recreates what free speech is, and it satisfies a certain longing that many people have had for such a long time to be able to be as misogynist and racist as possible and not have to be called out on it because they want to be able to defend themselves by saying, no, no, no, you have to understand what I'm doing here is really something very radical, very free speech oriented.

And it is an old, old story. I mean, this has always been true about the way that people interpret free speech in the First Amendment. we tell ourselves as Americans that we love free speech and we've always upheld it and we've always allowed for dissent to flourish and you actually look at our history and you look at how much every time truly radical ideas were expressed and those radical ideas in America are the radical ideas of racial and gender equality every time those ideas have been expressed we have locked people up we have put lynch mobs on them we have tortured them we have suppressed them that's our history, but we keep telling ourselves that we are actually defending something. Ruby Kramer put out a story with The New Yorker this week about Jane Doe's doxing, and something she covers are men who, for one reason or another, got caught up in the crossfire, who were doxed, too, after being erroneously associated with the men being sued. And you see this with these stories all the time, like people in the wrong place at the

wrong time who haven't actually done harm or people who happen to have the same first and last name as the accused and therefore get mistaken for them. I saw that happen like three times on X a couple weeks ago. My question is, what do we owe those individuals? Like, obviously, we don't want to see innocent people getting punished for stuff they didn't do. But sometimes avoiding that comes at the expense of actual victims, right? So how do we make room for both? I mean, it's genuinely a troubling question, right? And one answer is that, you know, the mob mentality that social media platforms have made possible is we are trying to protect all freedom of speech. And so everybody can say what they want. They can name her if they want. It doesn't matter. We have seen what that does to our environment. It's not just that you get a lot of misinformation and you get falsity, which you do, but you also get this fury and you get this immediacy and this unwillingness to slow down and fact check.

And you get this weird confidence that people online suddenly develop that they are, again, uniquely clued into what's happening. So how do we undo all of that? I mean, I think the answers aren't going to please people, but I don't think that social media platforms as they operate now are ever going to mean that we can have safe accusations like this. Because if the mob is going to come after people without any regard for whether this is accurate information or whether this is a proportional response, no one is going to want to speak out. I think anyone ethical is going to worry that even if you do have good information and you do have the right names, that you wouldn't want this to become a mob phenomenon because something terrible is going to happen. I don't think we should ever be enthusiastic about a mob coming to someone's house or people getting squatted or people's family members getting harassed and intimidated. And it just seems like there's no way to calibrate that, that the kind of bloodlust that is just sort of the currency of these social media platforms, it's incompatible with releasing information like this.

So I think at this point, there really isn't any safe way to release people's names or their information about these issues without this being the kind of inevitable result. Last month, I published an investigation into the Verniverse, which has been very, very active in the doxing of Jane Doe. And essentially, the Burnerverse is a community of college sports fan accounts, many of whom are frat kids, who have made something of a recreational sport out of doxing young women. And my story focused on a 20-year-old girl named Maddie Kowalski, who had a non-consensual intimate video of herself having sex circulated at UF, where she went to school. And the video likely would have just been circulated among kids at campus, if not for these anonymous burner accounts, amplifying it by posting it on X and including her full name and her sorority. It ruined her life. She was nonstop harassed by a text and phone calls and social media posts. So Snapchat in the Cornell case and the Burniverse in Maddie's story, how, if at all, are these two things in conversation with each other?

well i do think in in both situations you've got an amplifier effect by an app right and it's it is there's the underlying conditions that we've always seen prior to the technology that kind of homosocial bonding that kind of performativity of masculinity for men for other men and that's that kind of impulse to treat women always as lower on the hierarchy as men are and usually in a sexual way because that is the way that these things get expressed. And particularly in fraternities or in athletic teams, it's a kind of hazing process originally, right? You make certain men, you treat them like women, and you teach them how to be abused, right? And then you give them the power to abuse others, and you make it into essentially a bonding exercise. And then what does technology do for that? Well, then it adds a kind of performativity and a spectacle aspect of it that is somewhat new. So as opposed to maybe being a somewhat fleeting but also still potentially terrible event, it's now something you can record.

It is now something you can present to others. It is now something you can get an even larger audience for. Now you can turn the entire Internet basically into your online frat. And that, I think, is the really terrifying thing about the story that you highlighted, the fact that this isn't something that was ever easy for a victim to deal with, right? If it's your whole social circle, like all of your friends, everyone on your campus, your entire town, that was devastating enough. Now it's the entire world, right? Now it's the sense of absolute captivity to the online world that has no boundaries whatsoever, where nothing ever gets forgotten either. It is just terrifying, not only because we can see the results of it and what happens to the people caught up in it, it's what's being done to all the participants and what is happening to their sense of humanity or empathy or whatever they're going to make an example out of these women so they can feel better collectively about the status of people like them so i think that that's what's bonding a lot of these men i think that's why they use social media i think social media is driving a lot of it because

it is performative the more you can perform how much you are humiliating or degrading a woman the more of a man you are. We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back. AI systems don't operate in a vacuum. They need context. And that context comes from data. Choose the wrong data and your AI could deliver something between hallucination and guesswork. Dun & Bradstreet Context Layer, anchored in the Duns number, delivers the context your AI systems need to reason, decide, and act across your workflows. Business identities are resolved, relationships are clear, and continuously updated data keeps those systems grounded so your AI doesn't guess and you can operate with confidence. Give your AI the context it's missing. Learn more at dnb.com slash trustyourai. Social media is so often lauded for tearing down the walls between states and countries and continents and improving connectivity

But it's also removing our boundaries and increasing our sense of shamelessness and making us think about ourselves constantly. Ourselves as brands, our own self-interest. I guess what I'm wondering is, like, as somebody who has sort of witnessed the evolution of social media and the de-evolution, the accompanying de-evolution of how people are treating it, like, do you feel like people have just gotten worse as a whole? Like, I kind of, as somebody who covers Internet culture, I just think that every single day. Yes, although it doesn't affect everybody the same way, right? I mean, it's worse for some people than for others, but it's bad for all of us. So we can talk about it as we don't deserve sort of social media, but also that maybe social media is just it's a punishment, right? That this is what happens when you don't care about boundaries. This is what happens when you don't care about context.

This is what happens when you don't want and don't believe that you need to be responsible for your own communications. and that if people are ignoring you or that you're not having the connections that you want, that you should work on yourself and you should try to figure out how to have more meaningful connections to others. Instead, you've got this cheap, easy social media platform to tell you, no, I do deserve attention and anybody who denies it to me is wrong. And it just becomes this kind of expectation that, no, people must pay attention to me, not because I have anything interesting or valuable to contribute, but because I deserve it. that's a really terrible thing to do to humanity, I think. I think the idea that we don't have to work for our human connections is a terrible, terrible idea. So the more that we are told that we are the stars of our own story, the more that we are told that attention is something we can gain out, the worse everything it's going to get for everyone, but particularly for people who are already vulnerable. I think what a lot of people want in these moments is real actionable advice.

what would you tell young women in or starting college about best tech practices right now, like in terms of their own reputational and physical safety? I mean, I would have that conversation. But I guess what I would say first is I really do think that the conversation needs to be with the men. They're the ones we need to be talking to. But then you also want to be realistic about how can women keep themselves safe because no matter how many times you talk to men, does it mean that they're going to stop hurting women? Probably not. So what can you do to protect yourself? And this is going to maybe sound like not a very practical solution, but I hope that it is. I actually did for many years teach self-defense, and I do think that physical self-defense is the most valuable things that women can learn, not just because of the physical aspect of it, but because of the other things that are taught in good self-defense programs, which is reinforcing for women that no is a complete sentence. People who are trying to push your boundaries early on are going to do much worse things later.

Here are the red flags. Here are the kinds of things to avoid. Here's how you can engage in solidarity with people who are also vulnerable. So I think try to change men's behavior because they have to be held accountable, but also try to make sure that should it not go that way, that you will be prepared to be able to physically defend yourself and maybe help others. And to that end, what advice would you give young men starting college about best practices? Like what are some of the traps, particularly in the tech space, that you see young men getting caught up in and what can they do to basically avoid them or be better? Be much more intentional about why you are engaging with technology and social media in particular. I used to teach a class called Law Policy and Technology, and I would start it out by saying the last time you were on your phone or doing something on a social media site, Do you remember why you were on it? Were you trying to reach a certain goal with it? And part of what I wanted them to think about was, I can use social media, but I don't want it to be using me at the same time. Ask yourself after you've engaged on social media, do you feel better, worse?

Have you learned something? Do you feel stupider? Are you angry? Ask yourself, what am I actually getting out of this experience? If it's not something that you would do, right, in front of somebody, why would you do it online? which sounds obvious that sometimes escapes us because there is a gamification and dehumanization factor to being online. And I think that that's what I would suggest, that there are patterns here that everybody should know about, and they're probably not patterns that you want to embrace, so try not to embrace them and really have answers for why it is that you're making decisions every day, including the ones that you're making online. And what breaks my heart about it and what breaks my heart about a lot of these things is how many of these interactions begin because boys, girls, everyone are so lonely because they are being told, oh, you're very attractive or I'd like to get to know you better or I find you really sexy. Send me a photo. Show me this. How much of it begins in this really heartbreaking desire for connection, right, that obviously people are so eager for and then it turns into something really dark really fast. So I would think about, you know, what that, you know, again,

What is the interaction that you're trying to have here? Do you want to put pieces of yourself out into the world because you want connection or is it because of something? Is it something that you are grasping for that you're not going to get out of a social media connection? And a big part of it is just telling them all the horror stories of what can happen to you, right, without trying to blame people for what happens to them, just telling them these are the kinds of things that can happen. So I think think really carefully about what you want to reveal of yourself to others. Think of yourself as something precious, right, that does not need to be parceled out to other people because you are enough in yourself. You don't need to be chasing after someone else's validation. Hopefully you probably have skills and you probably have hobbies and you probably have interests and you probably have important actual connections around you that you could be spending time on. So a lot of this is do less of it. Be aware of the things that can go so badly, so quickly, and how those things are almost always going to begin in a place of vulnerability,

either yours or someone else's. And try to not look at vulnerability as something to exploit. Look at it as something to guide or to support or, if nothing else, to not make it worse when you see it in someone else. I understand that the work you do can be incredibly stressful. I know I'm stressed out every single day looking at my feed. What I want to know is what gives you hope? What do you see changing right now in real time? It is sometimes hard to find hope, but looking at the Cornell Daily Sun editorial, when I saw that headline, Cornell Won't We Will, when I saw that these were students who had kind of stuck with the story, that really wanted to tell the story, and they knew that it was a risk, right? They knew that there were going to be all kinds of legal and other implications of bringing the story out. I just thought, I don't know why these are not the free speech hero stories that we're telling, because to me, that's a free speech hero story. That is such a dedicated, brave kind of thing to do, and that really does make me, it does give me some hope.

It does actually give me hope that people continue, despite all of the terrible things that might be awaiting them for doing so, people do continue to speak out because they know something to be true or because they're trying to highlight something that is important. And so journalism is one of those things that really does speak to me still. I think, okay, there are still people who are going to talk about this no matter how much negative consequences are going to come from that. And I think that that's important. And as long as people are still willing to do that, then there's still something worth fighting for. Here's hoping. Thank you so much for being here today, Marianne, and for taking the time to talk about this. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, EJ, for having me on. The Big Interview is produced by Lena Messitzes. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. This episode was fact-checked by Samantha Spengler.

And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel. Thank you. relationships are clear and continuously updated data keeps agents grounded so your ai doesn't have to guess it reasons and drives decisions you can rely on give your ai the context it's missing visit dnb.com trust your ai