Mike Masnick

Michael Masnick is an American editor and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of Techdirt, a weblog.
He coined the term "Streisand effect" on the Techdirt blog in January 2005 and was interviewed about it three years later on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
In 2010-2012, Masnick played an important role in the SOPA-PIPA debates, "propell Techdirt into the single most important professional media site over the entire period, overshadowing the more established media."
In a 2019 essay titled "Protocols, Not Platforms", Masnick observed that social media platforms were in a "crisis" of content moderation, being accused both of being too lenient on hate speech and misinformation, and of stifling free speech. Masnick proposed that this could be addressed by developing protocols that allow individual users to filter content according to "their own tolerances for different types of speech." The essay inspired Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to launch the Bluesky research initiative, which later became a social media startup of its own. In August 2024, Masnick joined the board of Bluesky.