Online free speech has never been in more danger. Technologically illiterate politicians from both the left and right are demanding more censorship from big web platforms like Facebook and Google. They’re using the Internet as a partisan football and fear-mongering about everything from alleged foreign interference, to tide pods, to porn.

The result is that big web platforms are becoming trigger happy with censorship. Just this week Facebook deleted a page for a totally legitimate, permitted protest being organized by local activists in Washington, DC, claiming it was part of their purge of accounts associated with “inauthentic” behavior. And the problem isn’t new: Facebook was previously caught censoring live feeds of the Standing Rock pipeline protests. Thousands of YouTube channels from firearms reviewers, to left wing news channels have been demonetized, and effectively silenced. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all banned ads for cryptocurrency companies like Coinbase from advertising on their platforms.

We’ve learned since the fight against SOPA / PIPA that there’s nothing more threatening to free expression than when lawmakers who don’t understand how the Internet works are screaming at web platforms to “just do something” about problems that are legitimately difficult to solve from a technical perspective, and must be addressed with extreme care. What we need from these massive web companies is not more censorship, but more transparency, so that Internet users know more about what they’re being shown and why, and who is paying for it.