Fighting for
Facts,
Freedom, Democracy,
Innovation:
Nora Benavidez is a civil rights and free speech attorney. She works at the intersection of law, tech, and democracy, elevating interdisciplinary solutions to complex threats facing our society. In all her work, Benavidez fights to eliminate barriers that may diminish the ability for communities to engage in democracy and with each other.
Benavidez serves as Senior Counsel and Director, Digital Justice & Civil Rights at Free Press. She leads the organization’s democracy, free speech and tech initiatives, including policy, legal, advocacy, and corporate engagement portfolio. Her team fights for winning reform solutions that blunt disinformation, hate, and other manipulation online while protecting digital civil rights, privacy, and equitable speech. Benavidez has appeared before the the White House, U.S. Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, Canadian House of Commons, and other regulatory bodies.
Benavidez is the founder of Build the Bench, a network for Latina women entering law and public service. She sits on Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media, serves as a board member of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, and chairs the Georgia State Bar Section 1983 Litigation conference.
Previously, Benavidez served as Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America, where she guided the organization’s national advocacy agenda on First Amendment and free expression issues. Most notably, she led the organization's victorious and groundbreaking First Amendment lawsuit, PEN America v. Donald Trump, to hold the former president accountable for his retaliation against and censorship of journalists he disliked. She launched and led PEN America’s renowned disinformation defense program. And she authored numerous reports documenting attacks on the First Amendment.
Benavidez previously served as a consultant for TikTok, where she advised the product policy and other teams on interventions to support information integrity. She previously served as Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s Cronkite Institute where she created and taught “Freedom of Expression in the Digital Age.”
In 2021, she won the Society of Professional Journalists-Los Angeles Chapter Freedom of Information award for her work defending truth and free expression.
She previously worked in private practice and at the ACLU of Georgia, litigating significant cases representing victims of voting rights violations, unconstitutional police practices, and other First Amendment infringements. She has partnered with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights / Election Protection in emergency voter access litigation in Georgia. She served a founding board member emeritus of the Women’s March in Georgia.
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Benavidez has authored several original research reports. Most recently, she was the lead author of Free Press research reports Big Tech Backslide (2023), examining how tech companies’ retreat from platform integrity harms democracy as well as Empty Promises (2022), analyzing the role social media platform policies play in elections.
She was also the lead author of several groundbreaking PEN America reports on fundamental free speech and protest rights, including Arresting Dissent and Closing Ranks.
She is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, CNN, and Tech Policy Press.
Her expertise and commentary is regularly featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, CNN, NBC, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
