Favorite More than four years after its enactment, FOSTA remains an unconstitutional law that broadly censored the internet and harmed sex workers and others by chilling their ability to speak, organize, and access information online. And the fight to overturn FOSTA continues. Last week, two human rights organizations, a digital library, a sex worker activist,…
All posts tagged Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
EFF to European Court: No Intermediary Liability for Social Media Users
Favorite Courts and legislatures around the globe are hotly debating to what degree online intermediaries—the chain of entities that facilitate or support speech on the internet—are liable for the content they help publish. One thing they should not be doing is holding social media users legally responsible for comments posted by others to their social…
Plaintiffs Press Appeals Court to Rule That FOSTA Violates the First Amendment
Favorite Two human rights organizations, a digital library, a sex worker activist, and a certified massage therapist on Monday appealed a ruling that denied their constitutional challenge to FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), an overbroad and censorious internet law that harms sex workers. The plaintiffs, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Human…
The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People
Favorite Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for…
EFF Sends Letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to Oppose EARN IT
Favorite On Wednesday, February 9, EFF sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to strongly oppose S. 3538, the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2022 (EARN IT Act). EFF opposed the original and amended versions of this bill in the previous Congress, and our letter outlines our concerns with…
2021 Was the Year Lawmakers Tried to Regulate Online Speech
Favorite On the biggest internet platforms, content moderation is bad and getting worse. It’s difficult to get it right, and at the scale of millions or billions of users, it may be impossible. It’s hard enough for humans to sift between spam, illegal content, and offensive but legal speech. Bots and AI have also failed…
Lawmakers Choose the Wrong Path, Again, With New Anti-Algorithm Bill
Favorite Facebook needs to be reined in. Lawmakers and everyday users are mad, having heard former Facebook employee Frances Haugen explain how Facebook valued growth and engagement over everything else, even health and safety. But Congress’s latest effort—to regulate algorithms that recommend content on social media platforms—misses the mark. We need a strong privacy law.…
Records Shed New Light on Trump White House Officials’ Efforts to Punish Social Media
Favorite Within a day of Twitter fact-checking President Donald Trump’s May 2020 false tweets about mail-in voting, federal officials began trying to find out how much government agencies spent to advertise on social media. This inquiry was likely part of a planned effort to cut that funding, according to records released last month. The records,…
Bring on the Publicity Trolls: Federal Appeal Court Ruling Drastically Undermines Online Speech
Favorite In a disastrous ruling for online expression, innovation and competition, a federal appeals court has held that internet intermediaries are on the hook for expensive litigation and potential damages for violating a person’s “right of publicity,” (i.e., the right to control the commercial use of your persona). All because some people think of this…
Right or Left, You Should Be Worried About Big Tech Censorship
Favorite Conservatives are being censored Claiming that “right-wing voices are being censored,” Republican-led legislatures in Florida and Texas have introduced legislation to “end Big Tech censorship.” They say that the dominant tech platforms block legitimate speech without ever articulating their moderation policies, that they are slow to admit their mistakes, and that there is no…