With the upcoming U.S. elections, major U.S.-based platforms have stepped up their content moderation practices, likely hoping to avoid the blame heaped upon them after the 2016 election, where many held them responsible for siloing users into ideological bubbles—and, in Facebook’s case, the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio. It’s...

Update (10/29/2020): Our discussion of interoperability measures was altered to acknowledge that, while this is contemplated in the leaked document, the mentions are lacking the specificity of other measures under consideration.At the end of September, multiple press outlets published leaked set of antimonopoly enforcement proposals proposed for the a...

Not Just for COVID-19, But for the Next Crisis TooThe COVID-19 pandemic demands that governments, scientific researchers, and industry work together to bring life-saving technology to the public regardless of who can afford it. But even as we take steps to make medical technology and treatments available to everyone, we...

Three members of Congress have joined the fight for the right to protest by sending a letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to investigate federal surveillance against protesters. We commend these elected officials for doing what they can to help ensure our constitutional right to...

Every major social media platform—from Facebook to Reddit, Instagram to YouTube—moderates and polices content shared by users. Platforms do so as a matter of self-interest, commercial or otherwise. But platforms also moderate user content in response to pressure from a variety of interest groups and/or governments. As a consequence, social...

Here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have a guiding motto: "I Fight For the Users." (We even put it on t-shirts from time to time!) We didn't pick that one by accident (nor merely because we dig the 1982 classic film "Tron"), but because it provides such a...

This week was the California Bar Exam, a grueling two-day test that determines whether or not a person can practice law in California. Despite the privacy and security risks remote proctoring apps present to users, the California Bar, as well as several other state bars throughout the country, are requiring...

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many social media platforms shifted their content moderation policies to rely much more heavily on automated tools. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all ramped up their machine learning capabilities to review and identify flagged content in efforts to ensure the wellbeing...

As the extradition hearing for Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange unfolds, it is increasingly clear that the prosecution of Assange fits into a pattern of governments selectively enforcing laws in order to punish those who provoke their ire. As we see in Assange’s case and in many others before this, computer...