Favorite Texas State Representative Steve Toth recently introduced a bill that targets the most viable form of safe and effective abortion access today—medication abortion. House Bill (HB) 2690 seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills like Mifepristone and misoprostol, but it doesn’t stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the…
All posts tagged Content Blocking
The Filter Mandate Bill Is a Privacy and Security Mess
Favorite Among its many other problems, the Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies Copyright Act would mandate a slew of filtering technologies that online service providers must “accommodate.” And that mandate is broad, so poorly-conceived, and so technically misguided that it will inevitably create serious privacy and security risks. Since 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright…
Court’s Decision Upholding Disastrous Texas Social Media Law Puts The State, Rather Than Internet Users, in Control of Everyone’s Speech Online
Favorite The First Amendment and the freedom of speech and expression it provides has helped make the internet what it is today: a place for diverse communities, support networks, and forums of all stripes to share information and connect people. Individuals and groups exercise their constitutional right to host and moderate sites that offer a…
Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship
Favorite Tor, the onion router, remains one of the most effective censorship circumvention technologies. Millions of people use the Tor network every day to access the internet without fear of surveillance and censorship. Most people get on the Tor network by downloading the Tor Browser and connecting to a relay. But some countries, such as…
General Monitoring is not the Answer to the Problem of Online Harms
Favorite Even if you think that online intermediaries should be more proactive in detecting, deprioritizing, or removing certain user speech, the requirements on intermediaries to review all content before publication—often called “general monitoring” or “upload filtering”—raises serious human rights concerns, both for freedom of expression and for privacy. General monitoring is problematic both when it…
Abortion Information Is Coming Down Across Social Media. What Is Happening and What Next.
Favorite Reports have surfaced about the removal of information about abortion from social media. Unfortunately, none of it is unprecedented. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have long maintained broad and vague community standards that allows them to remove content with little recourse. What Is Happening As reported by Vice and followed up on by Wired,…
Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Platforms Are Censoring Nude Content. Here’s Why You Should Care
Favorite If their marketing is to be believed, self-avowed free speech maximalist sites like Parler—“where free speech thrives”—and Frank Speech—“the voice of free speech”—claim they will publish all user content. But the reality is a prohibition of many types of legal content, including legal sexual material. This restriction is all too familiar to queer communities,…
EFF Warns Another Court About the Dangers of Broad Site-Blocking Orders
Favorite A copyright holder can’t use a court order against the owner of an infringing website to conscript every intermediary service on the internet into helping make that website disappear, EFF and the Computer & Communications Industry Association argued in an amicus brief. The brief, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District…
11th Circuit's Ruling to Uphold Injunction Against Florida’s Social Media Law is a Win Amid a Growing Pack of Bad Online Speech Bills
Favorite There’s a lot to like in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling that much of Florida’s social media law—the parts which would prohibit internet platforms from removing or moderating any speech by or about political candidates or by “journalistic enterprises”—likely violate the First Amendment and should remain on hold. The decision is a…
EFF Statement on the Declaration for the Future of the Internet
Favorite The White House announced today that sixty one countries have signed the Declaration for the Future of the Internet. The high-level vision and principles expressed in the Declaration—to have a single, global network that is truly open, fosters competition, respects privacy and inclusion, and protects human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people—are laudable.…