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 and tech initiatives, including its policy, legal, grassroots, and tech work. She develops 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.
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. She launched and led PEN America’s renowned media literacy and disinformation defense program. She also 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.
Her writing and commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tech Policy Press, and other publications. She is 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 original PEN America reports on fundamental free speech and protest rights, including Arresting Dissent and Closing Ranks.
Benavidez is a member of the Council for Responsible Social Media, serves on the board of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, and chairs the Georgia State Bar annual Section 1983 Litigation Conference. 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 also 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.
