U.S. Supreme Court Does Not Go Far Enough in Determining When Government Officials Are Barred from Censoring Critics on Social Media

After several years of litigation across the federal appellate courts, the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous opinion has finally crafted a test that lower courts can use to determine whether a government official engaged in “state action” such...

Lawmakers: Ban TikTok to Stop Election Misinformation! Same Lawmakers: Restrict How Government Addresses Election Misinformation!

In a case being heard Monday at the Supreme Court, 45 Washington lawmakers have argued that government communications with social media sites about possible election interference misinformation are illegal.Agencies can't even pass on information...

Access to Internet Infrastructure is Essential, in Wartime and Peacetime

We’ve been saying it for 20 years, and it remains true now more than ever: the internet is an essential service. It enables people to build and create communities, shed light on injustices, and acquire vital knowledge that might not otherwise be...

Platforms Must Stop Unjustified Takedowns of Posts By and About Palestinians

Legal intern Muhammad Essa Fasih contributed to this post.Social media is a crucial means of communication in times of conflict—it’s where communities connect to share updates, find help, locate loved ones, and reach out to express grief, pain,...

EFF to D.C. Circuit: Animal Rights Activists Shouldn’t Be Censored on Government Social Media Pages Because Agency Disagrees With Their Viewpoint

Intern Muhammad Essa contributed to this post.EFF, along with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit urging the court to reverse a lower court ruling that upheld...

ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.

Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service...

International Rights Groups to Thierry Breton: You Need to Make Clear That Under the DSA States Can’t Shut Down the Internet as Punishment for Hateful Content on Platforms

EFF and 66 human rights and free speech advocacy groups across the globe today called on EU Internal Commissioner Thierry Breton to clarify that the Digital Services Act (DSA)—new regulations aimed at reining in Big Tech companies that control the...

A Year Since Dobbs, The Fight For Reproductive Privacy and Information Access Continues

A year ago this Saturday, the Supreme Court's Dobbs abortion ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. This decision deprived millions of people of a fundamental right. As we wrote then, it also underscored the importance of fair and meaningful protections...

This Texas Bill Would Systematically Silence Anyone Who Dares to Talk About Abortion Pills

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...

We Need to Talk About Infrastructure

Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral. These services should not make editorial decisions that remove content beyond the scope of the law. This is in part because history shows that any new censorship methods will eventually...

General Monitoring is not the Answer to the Problem of Online Harms

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...

Abortion Information Is Coming Down Across Social Media. What Is Happening and What Next.

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...

EFF Statement on the Declaration for the Future of the Internet

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...

UN Human Rights Committee Criticizes Germany’s NetzDG for Letting Social Media Platforms Police Online Speech

A UN human rights committee examining the status of civil and political rights in Germany took aim at the country’s Network Enforcement Act, or NetzDG, criticizing the hate speech law in a recent report for enlisting social media companies to...

O (No!) Canada: Fast-Moving Proposal Creates Filtering, Blocking and Reporting Rules—and Speech Police to Enforce Them

Policymakers around the world are contemplating a wide variety of proposals to address “harmful” online expression. Many of these proposals are dangerously misguided and will inevitably result in the censorship of all kinds of lawful and valuable...

Article 17 Copyright Directive: The Court of Justice’s Advocate General Rejects Fundamental Rights Challenge But Defends Users Against Overblocking

The Advocate General (AG) of the EU Court of Justice today missed an opportunity to fully protect internet users from censorship by automated filtering, finding that the disastrous Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive doesn’t run afoul of...

UK's Draft Online Safety Bill Raises Serious Concerns Around Freedom of Expression

On May 12, the UK government published a draft of its Online Safety Bill, which attempts to tackle illegal and otherwise harmful content online by placing a duty of care on online platforms to protect their users from such content. The move came...