The vast amount of information on the open web requires researchers and journalists to adapt with new tools to make sense of it all. Checking facts, gauging public opinion, and other lines of inquiry depend on being able to analyze the overwhelming amount of material posted online every day. Unfortunately, responding to the AI industry’s voracious appetite for data, companies stewarding this public data are looking to cash in and block access to the open web. This makes the web harder to navigate, and threatens all kinds of important research.

Reddit’s lawsuit against SerpAPI[1] and Perplexity threatens to do exactly that.

Reddit was once a very open platform, fostering a community of alternative apps and extensions putting users in control of their experience. Since the rise of AI however, it changed tack. Over the last three years Reddit has closed APIs to users, limited UI features, and otherwise restrained access without login. By making the voices on the platform harder to access, the company has positioned itself as a gatekeeper, and has since struck a lucrative data-sharing arrangement with Google.

SerpAPI, in contrast, is a tool which offers automated access to Google’s search engine results pages. It’s used by Perplexity, an AI-based search tool. Reddit sued to stop SerpAPI and Perplexity from bypassing Reddit’s own arrangement with Google. (Google brought a similar suit, which was dismissed by another court.)

It comes as little surprise that the legal weapon Reddit employed in this case is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the same “anti-circumvention” law that has caused so much trouble for artists, innovators, and researchers over the years—and that EFF has fought against from the beginning. Reddit’s suit claimed that SerpAPI’s use of widely used techniques to access Google search results amounted to “circumventing” access controls on copyrighted works. 

There are major problems with this argument. 

First, Reddit doesn’t own the copyright in its users’ posts—the users do, and they grant Reddit the right to distribute the posted content freely.

Second, there’s no meaningful copyright infringement going on here. Perplexity functions like a search engine, responding to users’ queries with relevant links and optionally an AI-generated summary. Crawling and indexing the web to create a search engine was long ago ruled a fair use under copyright law.

And third, Google’s efforts to put rate limits on search queries and block some kinds of automated querying aren’t the sort of “access controls” that Section 1201 was written for. The law was passed in 1998 and targeted things like breaking the encryption on DVDs and other digital media. In contrast to physical or paywalled media, Reddit posts are visible to everyone, without a paywall and generally without a login. 

Unfortunately, a federal district judge ruled in July that the suit could proceed, concluding that Section 1201 applied. That’s a dangerous ruling, because it casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over lots of important research, including efforts to study public sentiment through social media and to preserve records of historical events. Without tools that can look at the web at scale, many kinds of research are simply impossible today. But if employing those tools risks Section 1201 liability, only the wealthiest institutions will be able to use them.

We cannot let the internet be rebuilt such that information is divided up among a handful of gatekeepers and sold back to us like cable subscription packages. If our knowledge of the online world comes only through wealthy institutions, the cost of knowledge will only increase and access to unbiased answers diminishes. 

[1] SerpAPI is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.

The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users. 

The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated with social media, video games, and AI systems by introducing age-based access rules, safety requirements, and stronger enforcement and oversight measures. It presents itself as building on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and puts into “hard law” some of the safety-by-design measures specified in the non-binding DSA guidelines on minors’ protection. 

The proposal is built around the following elements: social media age “delay”, safety by design, age assurance and parental responsibility, and strong enforcement. Each of these measures are concerning.  

Mandatory Age Gates for Social Media and Video-Sharing Platforms 

Following the advice of an expert panel, the proposal would create a phased access to social media and video-sharing platforms deemed risky—a threshold met simply by relying on personalized recommender systems or offering “uninterrupted content consumption”: no service accounts for children under 13; restricted accounts under tight parental supervision from 13 to 15; and autonomous accounts in a safe-by-design environment from 15 to 18. Full online access is therefore reserved for adults. 

However they’re designed, age gates undermine civil liberties, reduce safety, and create barriers to internet entry, often at the expense of marginalized groups.

If this sounds complex and like a compliance nightmare, that’s because it is. The access delay comes with privacy-intrusive age verification across the board, relying on the EU age verification scheme. For teenagers, this law means significant control in the hands of their parents, who must set up accounts and prove that they are, in fact, parents, adding yet another problematic layer of verification. 

In fairness, the Kids Act’s gradual approach at least appears to be designed with some proportionality considerations, rather than imposing a blanket social media ban. Just last month a French court declared such undifferentiated bans unconstitutional. The EU Kids Act distinguishes between age groups and certain services and follows a risk-based approach. This means, for example, that age verification is not required for existing accounts if the provider can tell with a “high degree of confidence” that the user is above the age threshold—a vaguely specified standard.  

Yet, the law still indiscriminately covers social media and video-sharing, with virtually all mainstream services being covered by the proposal. The broad scope also sits uneasy with the use of age thresholds, which remain a blunt proxy for maturity. What is more, by focusing heavily on safety and harms, the EU Kids Act pays little attention to the privacy and freedom of expression rights of users, as well as the right of children themselves to access information and to participate online. However they’re designed, age gates undermine civil liberties, reduce safety, and create barriers to internet entry, often at the expense of marginalized groups. They also create a powerful infrastructure for control and further entrench the power of big tech. 

The proposal exempts not-for-profit encyclopedias, scientific repositories and educational services, as well as open-source software-developing and-sharing platforms. However, no exceptions are foreseen for small and medium-sized enterprises, which will only foster the dominance of resource-laden tech companies that were already investing in similar measures. And we know that most companies are well-advised to play it safe and use privacy-unfriendly age checks across their platforms. 

Safety by Design Across Covered Services 

The proposal’s second pillar, “safety by design”, casts a wider net. It applies across social media, video-sharing, online games, AI companions, chatbots and even app stores—with varying requirements. Providers must generally make child-safe design the default and can relax from the requirements only if they use age assurance to establish that the user is an adult. 

For example, rules on addictive features such as infinite scrolling, safe account settings, and more choice over recommender systems are to provide a safe internet experience to young people. As regards AI companions and chatbots, the proposal requires companies to design their services to reduce minors’ exposure to emotional dependencies and harmful interactions. Online games are covered as well: they must come with contact protections. The law also makes app stores the gate keeper for age-appropriate access, based on an age-rating system. 

The devil of these measures lies in the details, but all of them raise fundamental rights concerns and some of them seem poorly suited, if at all, to the decentralized architecture of the Fediverse. The requirement for very large online platforms to set up compliance plans before rolling out new services raises additional questions about the risks of transplanting product-safety doctrines of conformity and risk control into speech regulation. Deciding what is “safe” can easily become a question of what content people can access or share.  

Next Steps  

By choosing to regulate all these aspects through the Kids Act, the Commission not only but creates a privacy minefield, it also intermingles the digital fairness agenda with the more fundamental-rights heavy questions of age assurance and access to information. An unfortunate policy choice that will politicize well-intentioned efforts to curb manipulative and addictive design practices (read our position on the DFA). 

It speaks volume that the Kids Act has not gone through a full impact assessment process, which would typically require a systemic check of alternative policy options and stakeholder consultations. Looking forward, we call on the EU lawmakers to pull the teeth of the most harmful suggestions and to make sure that the new measures don’t erode the fundamental rights of all users. 

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here.

When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech under the company’s own policies in many instances. Meta’s own transparency report released later that year demonstrated similar findings. Five years later, researchers in the region report that overzealous moderation remains a problem, while paths to remedy have all but collapsed.

Where these systems are faltering in Arabic, they’re positively failing in less-resourced languages. As a 2025 report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found, labeled datasets in certain languages and dialects such as Maghrebi Arabic and Kiswahili contain inconsistencies, bias, and inaccuracies due to the limited hiring of annotators who actually speak the languages as well as shifts in the languages themselves. An investigation into ChatGPT’s outputs in several low-resource languages demonstrates the depth of problem.

But language disparities are just one of several concerns as automated moderation becomes more widespread. From the systemic suppression of content from Palestine to the repeated misclassification of LGBTQ+ content as adult or explicit material, these varied examples demonstrate the risks of overreliance on automated moderation—and the need for stronger safeguards.

Transparency, Cultural Competence, Appeals

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities.

As Rachel Griffin wrote in 2023, “Perfectly accurate moderation is not only technically out of reach but intrinsically impossible.” Despite those intrinsic flaws, there is a great deal companies, policymakers, and civil society can do to help ensure that highly-automated systems operate in ways that respect human rights, minimize predictable harms, and provide meaningful accountability when they fail. If companies are going to continue relying on automation to moderate users’ speech—and there is little reason to believe they won’t—then accountability must evolve alongside these technologies.

That evolution can start with committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. These principles, first outlined in 2020 and re-launched in 2021 after substantial international input, reflect the needs and expectations of the global community and specifically address automation. The first Foundational Principle states:

Companies should ensure that human rights and due process considerations are integrated at all stages of the content moderation process, and should publish information outlining how this integration is made. Companies should only use automated processes to identify or remove content or suspend accounts, whether supplemented by human review or not, when there is sufficiently high confidence in the quality and accuracy of those processes. Companies should also provide users with clear and accessible methods of obtaining support in the event of content and account action. 

Drawing on the Santa Clara Principles 2.0, international human rights standards, and years of research documenting the shortcomings of automated moderation, we propose eight recommendations for policymakers thinking about regulation and companies deploying AI-assisted content moderation systems.

1. Automated technologies should help, not replace, human moderators. For example, automated systems can help flag and prioritize content for review, while humans can interpret context, handle sensitive cases, and refine system performance.
2. Companies must be transparent about when and how automation is used in content decisions.
3. Companies must regularly audit their automated systems for bias, with particular attention to low-resource languages, vulnerable and marginalized communities, and conflict zones.
4. Users must have the ability to appeal, and to provide context when they believe human or automated moderation decisions have wrongfully removed their content. Appeals should be promptly evaluated and decided by human moderators.
5. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
6. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
7. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
8. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.

These recommendations understand that automated content moderation isn’t just a technical problem for clever engineers and product teams to solve. Because content moderation shapes public discourse and fundamental rights, its design and oversight must respond to the concerns of policymakers, civil society, independent researchers, and the communities most affected by these systems.

This is the second post in a 2-part series on automated content moderation. Read the first post here.

This is the second installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the first post here.

From Russia—where wartime censorship and more stringent platform controls have choked dissenting voices—to Nigeria, with its aggressive takedown orders turning social media into political battlegrounds, and to Turkey, where sweeping “disinformation” laws have made platforms heavily policed spaces, freedom of expression online is under attack. Per Freedom House’s 2023 Freedom on the Net Report, 66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone.

The online landscape looks markedly different than it did fifteen years ago. Back then, social media was still new and largely free from legal restrictions: platforms moderated content in response to user reports, governments rarely targeted them directly, and blocks (when they happened) were temporary, with censorship mostly focused on whole websites that VPNs or proxies could easily bypass. The internet was far from free, but governments’ crude tactics left space for circumvention.

Those early restrictions, as crude as they were, marked the start of a rapid evolution in online censorship. Governments like Thailand, which blocked thousands of YouTube videos in 2007 over critical content, and Turkey, which demanded takedowns from YouTube before blocking the site entirely, tested legal and technical pressures to mute dissent and force platforms’ compliance. By 2011, governments weren't just reacting—they had learned to pressure platforms into becoming instruments of state censorship, shifting their playbooks from blunt blocks to sophisticated systems of control that simple VPNs could no longer reliably bypass. Governments across the region were watching closely, and by the time the 2011 uprisings began, they were prepared to respond.

Looking Back

After learning that a Facebook page—We Are All Khaled Said, honoring a young man killed by police brutality—sparked Egypt’s street protests, Western media hailed online platforms as engines of democracy. Revolution co-creator Wael Ghonim told a journalist: “This revolution started on Facebook.” That claim was debated and contested for years; critically, Facebook had suspended the page two months earlier over pseudonyms violating its real-name policy, restoring it only after advocates intervened. 

Once the protests moved to the streets, Egypt’s government—alert to social media’s power—quickly blocked Facebook and Twitter, then enacted a near-total shutdown (more on that in part 4 of this series). As history shows, the measures didn’t stop the revolution, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down. For a brief moment, freedom appeared to be on the horizon. Unfortunately, that moment was short-lived.

Egypt’s Digital Dystopia

Just as the Egyptian military government quashed revolution in the streets, they also shut down  online civic space. Today, Egypt’s internet ranks low on markers of internet freedom. The military government that has ruled Egypt since 2013 has imprisoned human rights defenders and enacted laws—including 2015’s Counter-terrorism Law and 2018’s Cybercrime Law—that grant the state broad authority to suppress speech and prosecute offenders.

The 2018 law demonstrates the ease with which cybercrime laws can be abused. Article 7 of the law allows for websites that constitute “a threat to national security” or to the “national economy” to be blocked. The Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) has criticized the loose definition of “national security” contained within the law, as “everything related to the independence, stability, security, unity and territorial integrity of the homeland.” Notably, individuals can also be penalized—and sentenced to up to six months imprisonment—for accessing banned websites.

Articles 25, which prohibits the use of technology to “infringe on any family principles or values in Egyptian society,” and 26, which prohibits the dissemination of material that “violates public morals,” have been used in recent years to prosecute young people who use social media in ways in which the government disapproves. Many of those prosecuted have been young women; for instance, belly dancer Sama Al Masry was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 300,000 Egyptian pounds under Article 26.

Beyond Egypt: Regional Trends

Egypt’s trajectory reflects a wider regional and global pattern. In the years following the uprisings, governments moved quickly to formalize legal authority over digital space, often under the banner of combating cybercrime, terrorism, or “false information.” These laws often contain vaguely worded provisions criminalizing “misuse of social media” or “harming national unity,” giving authorities wide discretion to prosecute speech.

In Qatar and Bahrain, a social media post can result in up to five years in jail. In 2018, prominent Bahraini human rights defender Nabeel Rajab was convicted of “spreading false rumours in time of war”, “insulting public authorities”, and “insulting a foreign country” for tweets he posted about the killing of civilians in Yemen and sentenced to five years imprisonment. 

Two years later, Qatar amended its penal code by setting criminal penalties for spreading “fake news.” Article 136 (bis) sets criminal penalties for broadcasting, publishing, or republishing “rumors or statements or false or malicious news or sensational propaganda, inside or outside the state, whenever it is intended to harm national interests or incite public opinion or disturb the social or public order of the state” and sets a punishment of a maximum of five years in prison, and/or 100,000 Qatari riyals. The penalty is doubled if the crime is committed in wartime.

Now, as war has once again reached the region, these laws are being put to the test. Bahraini authorities have arrested at least 100 people in relation to protests or expression related to the war, while Qatar has arrested more than 300 people on charges of spreading “misleading information.”

And in the UAE, at least 35 people—most or all of whom are foreign nationals—have been arrested and “accused of spreading misleading and fabricated content online that could harm national defence efforts and fuel public panic,” according to the Times of India. The arrests fall under the UAE’s 2022 Federal Decree Law No. 34 on Combating Rumours and Cybercrimes which—says Human Rights Watch—is, along with the country’s Penal Code, “used to silence dissidents, journalists, activists, and anyone the authorities perceived to be critical of the government, its policies, or its representatives.”

From Regional Practice to Global Pattern

Today roughly four out of five countries worldwide have enacted cybercrime legislation, a dramatic expansion over the past decade, with many governments adopting or revising such laws in the years following the Arab uprisings. 

Outside the region, other nations have repurposed these laws to police speech. In Nigeria, journalists have been detained under the Cybercrime Act, with dozens of prosecutions documented since 2015. Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act has been used in thousands of cases—including hundreds against journalists—while in Uganda, authorities have prosecuted political critics under computer misuse laws for social media posts. 

Cybercrime laws are only one piece of a broader toolkit that governments now deploy to control digital spaces. Over the past decade, authorities have introduced sweeping “disinformation” laws, platform liability rules, age verification laws, and data localization requirements that force companies to store data domestically or appoint legal representatives within national jurisdictions. These measures give governments leverage over global technology firms, enabling them to demand faster content removals, obtain user data, or threaten steep fines and throttling if platforms fail to comply. Rather than relying solely on blunt instruments like blocking entire websites, states increasingly govern speech through layered regulatory systems that pressure platforms to police users on the state’s behalf.

The platforms too have changed. The same social media companies that were once championed as tools of democratic mobilization now operate in more constrained environments—and often act as willing participants in repressing speech. Facing financial penalties and the prospect of being blocked entirely, many companies expanded compliance with takedown requests after 2011, as can be seen in the companies’ own transparency reports. They later invested heavily in automated technologies that remove vast quantities of content before it is ever publicly available.

Rights groups around the world, including EFF, have warned that these dynamics disproportionately impact historically marginalized and vulnerable groups, as well as journalists and other human rights defenders. Research by the Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh and reporting by Human Rights Watch have documented how content moderation policies, government pressure, and opaque enforcement mechanisms increasingly converge—leaving activists, journalists, and human rights defenders caught between state censorship and platform governance.

The New Architecture of Repression

Looking back now, it’s clear that, fifteen years ago, governments were caught off guard. They crudely blocked platforms, shut down networks, and scrambled to contain movements they did not fully understand. But in the years since, states have systematically adapted, transforming what were once reactive measures into durable systems of control.

Today’s controls are embedded in law, outsourced to platforms, and justified through the language of security, safety, and order. Cybercrime statutes, disinformation frameworks, and platform regulations form a layered architecture that allows states to shape online expression at scale while maintaining a veneer of legality. In this system, repression is often procedural, bureaucratic, and continuous.

The question is no longer whether the internet can enable dissent, but whether it can still sustain it under these conditions.

This is the second installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.

This is the first installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings.

A new generation of protesters, raised on social media and often fluent in the tools of digital dissent, has taken to the streets in recent months and years. In Bangladesh, Iran, Togo, France, Uganda, Nepal, and more than a dozen other countries, young people have harnessed digital tools to mobilize at scale, shape political narratives, and sustain movements that might once have been easier to ignore or suppress.

The tools at their disposal are vast, allowing them to coordinate quickly and turn local grievances into visible, transnational moments of dissent. But each new tactic is met in turn: governments now implement draconian regulations and deploy sophisticated surveillance systems, content manipulation, and automated censorship to pre-empt, predict, and punish collective action. 

This cycle of digital empowerment and repression is not new. In many ways, its roots can be traced to the 2011 uprisings that rippled across the Middle East and North Africa. Often referred to as the “Arab Spring,” these movements didn’t just reshape politics…they transformed how we talk about the internet, and how governments respond in times of protest, crisis, and conflict. Fifteen years later, the legacy of that moment still defines the terms of resistance and control in the digital age.

At the time, we were sold the comforting narrative that the internet would help bring about democracy, that connectivity itself was revolutionary, and that Silicon Valley’s products—particularly social media platforms—were aligned with the people. It was a narrative that tech executives were sometimes happy to amplify and certain Western governments were happy to believe. 

But the same networks that helped protesters to organize and broadcast their demands beyond their own borders laid the groundwork for new forms of repression. Over the years, the same tools that were once celebrated as tools of dissent have become instruments for tracking, harassing, and prosecuting dissenters.

This series examines the digital legacy of the 2011 uprisings that shook the region: how governments refined censorship and surveillance after 2011, how platforms alternately resisted and enabled those efforts, and how a new generation of civil society has pushed back.

"Over the years, the same tools that were once celebrated as tools of dissent have become instruments for tracking, harassing, and prosecuting dissenters."

When Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, after repeated harassment by local officials, he could not have known the chain reaction his act would spark. After nearly twenty-three years in power, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali faced a public fed up with repression. Protests spread across Tunisia, ultimately forcing him to flee.

In his final speech, Ben Ali promised reforms: a freer press and fewer internet restrictions. He left before either materialized. For Tunisians, who had lived for years under normalized censorship both online and off, the promises rang hollow.

At the time, Tunisia’s internet controls were among the most restrictive in the world. Reporting by the exiled outlet Nawaat documented a sophisticated filtering regime: DNS tampering, URL blocking, IP filtering, keyword censorship. Yet despite that machinery, Tunisians built a resilient blogging culture, often relying on circumvention tools to push information beyond their borders. When protests began—and before international media caught up—they were ready.

Eleven days after Ben Ali fled, Egyptians took to the streets. International headlines rushed to label it a “Twitter revolution,” mistaking a tool for a movement. Egypt’s government drew a similar conclusion. On January 26, authorities blocked Twitter and Facebook. The next day, they shut down the internet almost entirely, a foreshadowing of what we’d see fifteen years later in Iran.

As Egyptians fought to free their country from President Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic rule, protests swept across the region to Bahrain, where demonstrators gathered at the Pearl Roundabout before facing a brutal crackdown; to Syria, where early calls for reform spiraled into one of the most devastating conflicts of the century; to Morocco, where the February 20 Movement pushed for constitutional change. Outside of the region, movements took shape in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Iceland, the United States, and beyond.

In each context, digital platforms helped circulate images, testimonies, and tactics across borders. They created visibility—and, in turn, inspired a playbook. Governments watched not only their own populations but one another, quickly learning how to disrupt networks, identify organizers, and seize back control of the narrative.

Cause and Effect

To be clear, the internet didn’t create these movements. Decades of repression, corruption, labor organizing, and grassroots activism did. Later research confirmed what many in the region already understood: digital tools helped people share information and coordinate action, but they were neither the spark nor the engine of revolt.

But regardless, the myth of the “Twitter revolution” had consequences. The breathless coverage, and rapid policy reactions that followed shaped state strategy around the world. Governments across the region and well beyond invested heavily in surveillance technologies, developed new legal mechanisms, increased their own social media presence, and found ways to influence platforms. Internet blackouts, once rare, became a normalized tool of crisis response. And companies were forced into increasingly public decisions about whether to resist state pressure or comply.

When it comes to the internet, the legacy of the 2011 uprisings that swept the region and beyond is a story about power: how states moved to consolidate control online, how platforms—often under pressure—have narrowed the space for dissent, and how civil society has been forced to evolve to defend it.

This five-part series will take a deeper look at how the internet as a space for dissent and for hope has changed over the past fifteen years throughout the region and well beyond.