On November 11, Lina Attalah, founder and editor-in-chief of the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr, will face trial for the second time in just two weeks. This time, she faces charges of spreading false news, an accusation that has become one of the Egyptian government's most frequently used tools for prosecuting journalists. 

The trial follows a conviction on October 27, when Attalah was found guilty of managing an unlicensed news website. The Mada Masr team had repeatedly applied for a license, but their attempts went unacknowledged. The proceedings took place in a single hearing, which Mada Masr states included serious violations of her right to a fair trial. She was sentenced to the maximum fine of 3 million Egyptian pounds (approximately 55,000 USD), forcibly removed from the courtroom, and held for seven hours until the fine was paid. The court also ordered Mada Masr's closure and the confiscation of all equipment belonging to the organization. 

The current wave of repression has also targeted Matsada2sh, a fact-checking and open-source intelligence initiative. Its entire six-person newsroom was violently arrested, illegally detained, and interrogated under torture before being charged with terrorism-related offenses and spreading false news. The team remains in pretrial detention. 

According to CPJ, at least 25 other journalists are currently incarcerated in Egypt. 

Governments seeking to control the flow of information increasingly rely on a combination of legal harassment, financial pressure, criminal prosecution, and restrictions on the infrastructure that makes independent publishing possible. Egypt's media licensing regime is a particularly troubling example. Requiring news organizations to obtain government authorization to operate creates an obvious mechanism for restricting who gets to publish and whose voices are allowed to reach the public.  

The charge of spreading false news is similarly dangerous. Governments around the world have increasingly invoked the language of misinformation to justify restrictions on speech, often without meaningful safeguards against political abuse, as we laid out in our recent submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Governments should never be the arbiters of which reporting is permissible, particularly when that reporting concerns their own conduct. 

Why Mada Masr matters 

Founded in 2013, Mada Masr has spent more than a decade doing the kind of journalism that authoritarian governments find most threatening: documenting abuses, amplifying marginalized voices, and reporting on issues that powerful institutions would prefer remain hidden. 

Its reporting has given torture survivors and the families of political prisoners a platform. It has opened space for debate about reproductive rights. It has brought frontline reporting from Sudan and Gaza, and stood alongside refugees facing xenophobic attacks and security crackdowns. 

Emerging as a digital-first publication, in a media environment where traditional outlets were increasingly constrained, being purely digital allowed Mada Masr’s founders to build an independent publication outside the structures of legacy media.  

At a time when only 43% of Egyptians had access to the internet, going fully digital meant taking a big risk, but it was one that has been rewarding: Despite being blocked by the Egyptian government since 2017, Mada Masr has continued to reach Egyptian and global audiences, and Attalah has received numerous accolades, including the Knight International Journalism Award, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a spot in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people (2020). 

Mada Masr has also consistently engaged with technology and advocated for a free and independent internet for the global majority. It has covered dozens of hot-button tech stories in recent years, from Egypt’s Cybercrime Bill and Israel’s use of AI weaponry in Gaza, to stories about the “privacy chaos” caused by biometrics to more personal essays about the importance of the internet and tech. In August, they launched an open call for proposals on original critical reporting on artificial intelligence. 

Mada Masr may be thoroughly Egyptian, but it doesn’t belong just to Egypt. Its team has made into a publication that represents the kind of independent, local, grounded journalism that international audiences need, particularly at a time when international reporting on state repression is lacking. They built on-the-ground networks to center local voices in Sudan (publishing in both English and Arabic on the conflict) and Gaza out of a sense of cross-border responsibility and solidarity. 

This is precisely why its potential closure should concern everyone who cares about a free press. The ability to publish independently, investigate powerful institutions, and to share information without government interference is fundamental to the exercise of free expression.  

From solidarity to action 

The international community has repeatedly expressed concern about restrictions on press and internet freedom in Egypt. More than 100 organizations have now joined statements of solidarity with Mada Masr, and with Matsada2sh.  

These expressions of support matter, particularly when journalists are increasingly isolated and under threat—but solidarity must also translate into sustained political and institutional pressure. 

The international governments and institutions that maintain relationships with Egypt—including those in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should make clear that the prosecution of journalists and the forced closure of independent media outlets are unacceptable.  

The cases against Lina Attalah, Mada Masr, and Matsada2sh must be dropped. The journalists who remain in detention must be released. And Egypt's licensing regime, with its profound chilling effects on access to information and independent knowledge production, must be brought to an end. 

There is a particular urgency to defending independent media at a moment when governments are finding ever more ways to restrict the circulation of information. Whether through internet shutdowns, platform restrictions, surveillance, or the criminalization of reporting, the result is often the same: fewer opportunities for people to understand what is happening around them, to challenge official narratives, and to hold power accountable. 

We cannot allow the closure of one of Egypt's most important independent newsrooms and the prosecution of its editor-in-chief to become another routine episode in the global erosion of press freedom. Nor should we wait until the last independent journalists have been silenced before recognizing what has been lost. 

To learn more about Lina Attalah in her own reads, you can read our Speaking Freely interview from January 2026. 

  

Developers of virtual private network (VPN) apps are reporting that their products are again being pulled from Apple’s App Store in Russia. This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Why? VPNs give people a way to control their own online activities. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server's location (well, IP address) rather than your actual location. It's like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn't know where you really live. It can also disguise where you’re accessing information from, which can make it possible to access information banned by your government.

This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Going after tools that give people the space to communicate and access information freely is a common tactic from the totalitarian playbook. This latest demand comes after several steps the Russian government’s taken to surveil speech specifically on Apple products. In 2024, the Moscow Times reported that Russia’s state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, went after VPN apps on the Apple App Store, after banning access to Western social media platforms and blacklisting opposition media sites. Russia then blocked Apple’s FaceTime software in 2025, according to Apple Insider.

Bloomberg also recently reported that the Russian government has added Apple and Microsoft to its state surveillance registry. This gives Roskomnadzor access to local users’ correspondence, Apple Insider reported, and puts both companies in a position to turn over customer information to the country’s security services as required.

With government control encroaching on their devices and less access to tools that give them alternate methods, people in Russia are left with shrinking options to communicate online or find information that isn’t state-sanctioned.

While Russia’s actions offer a more extreme vision of what happens when the government tries to enforce speech rules by attacking vital privacy tools, it is far from the only government doing so. Several states in the U.S., bent on making it difficult to circumvent invasive age-gating laws, have suggested banning VPNs—either to access certain content or in some cases to simply ban them outright. EFF has publicly (and loudly) criticized these proposals, because going after VPNs is a dangerous step down the road of censorship.

Attacks on speech and privacy online are deeply troubling, no matter where they happen. What those in power may see as a “loophole” in their invasive laws is actually an expression of user control. We’ll continue to speak out when we see governments going after them to take that control away.

In today’s digital world, the internet is an essential resource for young people to access information, explore community, and find themselves. But we know that this often comes alongside fears of experiencing online harms like doxxing, grooming, or bullying.

Trying to protect your family from everything all the time is impractical and exhausting, but some thoughtful planning can help families devise a workable plan that meets their needs and addresses their concerns.

That’s why this Digital Parent Week, we’re sharing easy tips on how parents and their children can work together to co-curate a digital safety plan that helps all members of the family enjoy the benefits of technology while protecting their online privacy and safety. 

Start with Open Conversations

Online safety begins with communication, not just restrictions. Talk with a young person about how they use the internet: their favourite apps, games, and social media platforms for example. Creating a supportive environment helps young people feel comfortable asking for help if something goes wrong online.

Together, you can think about:

1. What do we want to protect? e.g., I want to protect a young person’s privacy and mental health when they’re playing Roblox. They love Roblox and use it to communicate and hang out with their best friend, so we’d like to find a way to make it as safe as possible.
2. Who do we want to protect it from? e.g., messages from strangers, staying up too late playing, wasting money on pointless digital junk in games.
3. How bad are the consequences if we fail? e.g, losing some money on a scam or having creepy conversations with strangers that could escalate into something more nefarious or dangerous.
4. How likely is it that we will need to protect it? e.g., I don’t know the likelihood of a stranger messaging you on Roblox because I’m not sure how communication works on the platform, but I’ve heard from their friends that strangers message them all the time in some games.
5. How much trouble are we willing to go through to try to prevent potential consequences? e.g., I’m willing to learn from my child how the game works, play the game with my child, and learn how to work the parental controls. 
6. Who are our allies? e.g., my partner, our parents, as well as a young person’s best friends and their parents.

It's easy to think of a young person's experience on the internet as being totally disconnected and different from your own. But now is a great time to also interrogate your own internet habits, like the sorts of sites you engage with, tools you use, and privacy settings you've set. These questions are as valuable to help you as a parent as they are just an internet user.

Sometimes even just figuring out what conversations are worth having can take some effort, we've put together some ideas to get you started in our guide.

Make Privacy a Family Priority

Digital security training can feel overwhelming but this is why a community-oriented approach helps. In speaking with your family and friends, you can build out digital security practices that work for you. This makes it more likely that your privacy practices will become second nature to you and your loved ones.

Use secure messaging services for every communication: Choosing a secure service ensures that your privacy is protected from government and corporate surveillance. If you can convince your family to get on board, options like Signal provide the most extensive privacy protections out of the box through its use of end-to-end encryption and limited data collection. But we understand that sometimes it's easier to stick with whatever the family already uses for a group chat, like WhatsApp, Apple's iMessage, or Google Messages, so take the time to familiarize yourself with the limits of WhatsApp and RCS encryption.

Consider the content posted online: It's easy to accidentally share personal information through photos, messages, and other content. Children and adults may unknowingly share personal information through photos, messages, location settings and app permissions. Take time together to review privacy settings, check which apps can access the camera or location, and discuss why personal details should be shared carefully. Make sure you have family agreement about when and where to post photos of each other or your home.

Create incident response plans: Developing a plan for if or when something bad happens is a good practice for anyone, but especially with younger people. It’s important to strategize with your family around what to do in the event of such things happening, and doing so before an incident occurs is much easier than when you’re presently facing a crisis.

Alongside this, simple steps like using strong and unique passwords on all devices, including those that are shared in the family, can make a real difference. Regardless of age, there’s no time like the present to get started on good security hygiene, and for many that starts with a password manager and two-factor authentication.

How to Think About Parental Controls

Many sites permit parents to control features such as personalization, algorithmic feed, autoplay, endless scroll, reactions, notifications, and time limits. Talk as a family about which features are important and useful and which are problematic. The conversations above around boundaries and digital literacy are a more effective way to prepare youth for accessing the internet. To develop true autonomy, young people need the privacy to discover the world for themselves without their parents monitoring the contents of every conversation they have.

Explore new apps together and revisit family rules as they grow. These decision points where you’re exploring with a young person what you’re both comfortable with can be good moments to “find your way to a yes” for whatever feature or tool or game they’re asking about. The questions they ask, along with your responses, provide a road map for what to look for in privacy controls that can get you to a place where everyone is comfortable engaging with that technology. 

Small Steps = Big Difference

There is no one size fits all to the tech questions and concerns a parent will face, and keeping young people safe online is not about removing every risk and monitoring every click. This Digital Parenting Week, you can start to focus on what’s important for your family and how to best achieve those goals. 

If you're still not sure where to start, installing EFF’s Privacy Badger on every computer in your household is a great starting point to protecting everyone's privacy.

For more detailed information on all these tips and more, visit EFF’s Online Privacy Guide for Parents and Youth.

Everyone knows, or should, that perfect (balanced, targeted, transparent, swift and swiftly appealable) content moderation at scale is impossible. That doesn’t mean powerful social platforms don’t have to try to get at least reasonably close, especially when access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

That’s why so many people, including the Meta Oversight Board, criticized Meta for suspending a major political Instagram account for hours during a huge early voting push on October 17; and for allegedly boosting one candidate in Brazil’s recent presidential election. Meta denies deliberate interference in either instance, blaming “mistakes” in its automated content moderation systems (including AI tools that can’t tell the difference between enthusiastic follower engagement and a bot attack).

Mistakes or not, with early voting in the U.S. midterms already underway, these events serve as a stark reminder that all major social media platforms need to have stronger systems in place to ensure that they serve, rather than impede, democratic communication.

Access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

This is not inherently an “AI” problem: 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. And moderation errors are even more likely when the language is spoken principally by the global majority. In 2020, leaked documents showed that Meta’s algorithms 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. 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.

Fortunately, 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 work should start with publicly committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. Specifically:

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. This investment is particularly important during the weeks immediately before and after an election.
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. Companies should strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies. Automated content moderation often relies on personal data and profiling, so companies should think carefully about what data these systems use, what's necessary and proportionate and how their systems shape moderation outcomes.
5. 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.
6. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
7. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
8. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
9. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.
10. Policymakers should work to educate the public about how their personal data may be collected and used in electoral contexts.

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.

One other distinct and enduring problem makes transparency, checks, and accountability all the more urgent: too few companies have far too much power over our political communication and organizing. Social media gave people the ability to wrest some control over political messaging away from media oligopolies. But we’ve met the new boss and while it’s not the same as the old boss, the song is pretty familiar. The real promise of the web to democratize communication is not likely to be met by social media oligarchs, no matter how sophisticated their content moderation practice.

The Brazilian National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) plays a pivotal role in the regulation of digital platforms according to new legislation approved in Brazil. Throughout this year, EFF has presented comments, filed submissions, and met with the agency to emphasize crucial guardrails that the enforcement of new regulations should ensure. 

ANPD is responsible for detailing and applying obligations set in Law n. 15.211/2025, which established rules for the protection of children and adolescents in the digital space. While some provisions establish important privacy safeguards, like prohibiting advertising based on profiling of underage users, the law created mandatory age assurance mechanisms for accessing digital products and services. 

We have raised alarms on the privacy and free expression issues around age-gating the internet. Age verification technology is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive. Examples also show how it’s prone to enforcement overreach, resulting in sites blocked beyond legal requirements. In the UK, providers disproportionately restricted several counseling, support and mental health sites under the Online Safety Act. Current age assurance methods risk wrongly walling off adults with no valid IDs, facial differences, physical disabilities, among others. 

We highlighted these concerns in our comments and submissions underscoring that ANPD should avoid a blanket approach to age assurance obligations. Following the legislation, restrictions should apply only to products and services that are inadequate or prohibited to children and adolescents according to categories already set in regulation, with robust protections against subjective and overbroad interpretations. Guarantees such as access to information, freedom to participate in society and meaningful access to technologies also compound what constitutes the best interests of the child.  

Moreover, we stressed that zero knowledge proofs alone fail to ensure strong user privacy, including safeguards that the law itself sought to secure. Our submission explains why other requirements, such as unlinkability, selective disclosure, batch issuance and processing on device, are crucial for achieving greater levels of protection and mitigating privacy harms. Minimum information being shared to the verifier and no “phoning home” to the issuer of a user’s accepted credentials are conditions that prevent actions like collusion and data sharing about the user. 

We also shared inputs about the scope of the law, asking more clarity on which providers are covered by its obligations and the importance of treating differently non-dominant players like federated networks and free software applications. Without that clarity, this could negatively impact beyond gaming and major platforms that are the main target of these regulations. We elaborated on the agency’s regulation of prevention duties, the relevance of modulating them according to the type and structure of providers, and alerted them that their interpretation should not result in general monitoring obligations. 

On another but related front, we sent comments regarding Brazil’s new internet intermediary rules. Here too, ANPD has a critical regulatory role after a Supreme Court’s decision and presidential decrees changed the liability regime initially set in the law known as “Marco Civil.”  

With the turn to notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations, we emphasized measures to prevent censorship of protected content. These involve ensuring solid means for appeals of restricted posts, avoiding overreliance on AI-based content moderation, strictly tailoring the application of concepts like duty of care and systemic failure, and not normalizing the blocking of platforms and websites.  

We raised concerns about a trend reflected in the new regulation requiring platforms to proactively report user to authorities with unclear guarantees. Finally, we urged the agency to advance essential transparency and accountability measures for enabling greater public oversight over the application of the new regime. 

As we said before, platform accountability under the new rules ultimately hinges on how accountable its enforcement will be by platforms and state institutions. Rigorous commitment to fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy and data protection, is required so that intended protections don’t instead lead to harms. ANPD must uphold this commitment and make sure that new regulations don’t backfire. 

No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S.   

Last fall, we sued on behalf of three major labor unions to stop this surveillance program. And just this month, we won our first major ruling: A federal district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit. This means the case can move forward—a win for free speech and a critical step in protecting our First Amendment rights online. We’ve already explained why this is a big deal for our clients, so let's take a closer look at the court’s reasoning.  

Our Lawsuit 

 Since taking power, the Trump administration has used AI and other automated tools to broadly surveil the social media and online speech of visa and green card holders, with the goal of identifying and punishing people who express views it opposes. The government is targeting a broad range of views, including criticism of the Trump administration; support for Palestine or criticism of Israel; “rationalizing or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s murder; and anything nebulously “hostile” to American culture, founding principles, “traditional American views,” or “our way of life.”  

It has paired that surveillance with a public intimidation campaign. High-ranking officials have explicitly threatened to punish noncitizens for their online speech, then followed through with a series of terrifying viewpoint-driven enforcement actions. This has led to a significant chilling effect on speech, not just for noncitizens, but also for their families, coworkers, and friends. 

In response, three major labor unions—the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security alleging that this viewpoint-based surveillance program violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  The unions are represented by EFF, Muslim Advocates (MA), and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA). 

The government moved to dismiss our lawsuit, arguing first that federal immigration law prevents federal district courts from hearing the case, and second, that the unions don’t have “standing” to sue. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York rejected both arguments and allowed the case to proceed. At this stage in the litigation, the court accepted all of the facts in our complaint as true and analyzed the law based on those facts. We will now prove these facts as the case proceeds. 

Federal Immigration Law Doesn’t Block Our Lawsuit 

 The government first argued that the court had no power to hear our case at all. It pointed to three provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that restrict when federal courts can review immigration matters. The district court disagreed and rejected each provision in turn. 

The first provision, 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9), is often called the “zipper clause.” It bars federal courts from hearing challenges that arise from efforts to deport someone, except through review of an individual’s final removal order. The government claimed the zipper clause applies here because our lawsuit is really an effort to stop it from initiating adverse immigration actions. 

 The district court wholly rejected this argument. Relying on the Second Circuit’s decision in Ozturk v. Hyde, it held that the zipper clause bars only challenges to a particular individual’s removal proceedings, not a lawsuit like ours that challenges the constitutionality of the surveillance program itself. That the surveillance program might affect someone’s immigration proceeding down the line doesn’t turn our lawsuit into a removal challenge. 

 The court similarly rejected the government’s argument that § 1252(g) and § 1252(f)(1) prevent federal courts from hearing this case. Our suit, the court explained, “challenges the constitutionality of a government policy that is collateral to any active removal proceedings,” so § 1252(g) doesn’t apply. And § 1252(f)(1) only limits what kind of relief a court can give. So while the court may not be able to stop a particular person’s removal proceedings, it can still block “an unlawful surveillance program that suppresses free speech.” 

 The Unions Have Standing to Sue 

 To sue in federal court, a plaintiff must show that it has “standing” to bring its claims. This requires a plaintiff to show an “injury in fact” that is, among other things, “concrete.” That’s often a high bar in surveillance cases, where plaintiffs can’t easily see what the government is doing behind the scenes. And the Supreme Court has held that a person’s mere subjective fear of surveillance is too speculative to confer standing.  

Even so, our plaintiffs cleared the bar. The court held that the unions alleged concrete injuries, including a chill on members’ speech that is objectively reasonable, not just subjectively felt. It found that the unions had established standing in two ways: “organizational standing,” based on the unions’ own injuries, and “associational standing,” based on injuries the unions’ members have suffered. 

Organizational Standing 

The court first held that our plaintiffs had successfully alleged an injury to the unions themselves (injury was the only aspect of organizational standing the government disputed). The surveillance program has harmed the unions’ ability to carry out their core responsibilities, including “organizing their members and advocating for the unions’ goals.” The court made two key points: 

1. Unions Are Injured When Members Go Silent 

As we explained in our complaint, the surveillance program has caused members to step back from union leadership roles; stop participating in union activities online and in person; remove their names from union webpages; and avoid filling out bargaining surveys. Members who might otherwise spread the unions’ message and raise awareness of union issues are staying quiet, hampering the unions’ ability to organize. The court said this amounts to a concrete injury for purposes of standing. 

2. Surveillance Doesn’t Need to Target Pro-Union Speech  

 The court also rejected the government’s claim that members’ retreat from union activities was “essentially an overreaction,” because the surveillance doesn't target pro-union views. The court said this misunderstands the issue: “the question is whether the Government’s conduct would deter a person of ordinary firmness from engaging in protected activity, not whether the specific expression a member forgoes is itself among the viewpoints the Government disfavors.” 

Here, the surveillance program monitors noncitizens’ online activity indiscriminately, and members “cannot reliably predict which of their activities will be captured” and attributed to a disfavored viewpoint. What’s more, the court noted, the unions’ organizing often happens alongside the very advocacy the government is alleged to target, “including pro-Palestine and anti-ICE activism on college campuses.” That makes members’ retreat from union activity a foreseeable consequence of the program. 

Associational Standing  

 The court also held that the unions established associational standing to sue on behalf of their members. Of the three requirements for associational standing, the government challenged only two. It argued that members lacked sufficiently concrete injuries to sue in their own right, and that the claims aren’t “germane” to the unions’ purpose. 

The court disagreed and found associational standing for every claim but one: members’ right to receive information. That claim survives anyway, because the unions’ organizational standing covers it. Along the way, the court made several important rulings. 

 1. The Ongoing Surveillance Is a Present Injury 

 As a threshold matter, the government argued that our case is a “pre-enforcement challenge,” meaning we sued before the government actually punished anyone. That would trigger a different test, and the government argued we failed it because we hadn’t alleged a sufficiently imminent threat of prosecution. 

The court disagreed, explaining that “Plaintiffs’ allegations are of an ongoing surveillance program that is actively chilling the speech of their members and otherwise causing harm.” That chilling effect is a First Amendment injury even if there isn’t a direct prohibition on speech. And when government conduct is actively chilling speech right now, a challenge to it isn’t pre-enforcement. 

 2. Surveillance + Public Threats Reasonably Chills Speech 

 The court rejected the government’s argument that we alleged only a generalized, subjective, speculative fear of surveillance, explaining that “the chilling effect” of the program can “itself be an injury when the plaintiffs are surveilled.” Here, plaintiffs have alleged that their members are under active surveillance, which has had objective chilling effects on their speech. And the government is targeting certain disfavored viewpoints, making it “viewpoint discrimination” that is “presumptively unconstitutional.” 

The chill is also objectively reasonable, the court held, because the government has extensively publicized the surveillance program through public statements and social media posts, making clear that noncitizens who post disfavored views will be targeted for removal. Notably, the court agreed with us that the “threat of adverse immigration consequences, under a government whose harsh immigration crackdowns has been heavily publicized and reported on, is certainly enough to deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights.” This is a concrete injury sufficient for standing. 

3. Demanding Social Media Handles Also Causes Harm 

Under the surveillance program, applicants for certain immigration benefits must disclose all social media handles they have used during the preceding five years and, in some instances, maintain public social media accounts. The district court held that this too amounts to a First Amendment injury, undermining the rights to anonymity and freedom of association.  

The judge pointed to one CWA member we identified, a lawful permanent resident with a pending naturalization application who is subject to the five-year disclosure requirement. The member has deleted one social media account, set another to private, and removed past posts expressing disfavored views. These allegations, the court said, show an actual and objectively reasonable injury due to the government’s surveillance program.

4. General, Public Threats Can Still Be Coercive 

We also argued that the Trump administration is waging a campaign of coercive threats to suppress disfavored speech, which the First Amendment prohibits. The court agreed that this campaign can be an actionable injury of its own. 

Notably, the court held that it didn’t matter that the government’s statements were not specifically targeted at certain individuals, and were instead made on social media or to the public. In this case, the court explained, “the number, severity, and high-profile examples of action upon those threats are such that a reasonable person would perceive the communication as coercive.” 

That means it’s reasonable that the unions’ members “would, and did, limit their public speech on disfavored viewpoints” in response. That the threats were made to the general public “does not diminish this injury,” as the very purpose of the challenged surveillance program is to intimidate noncitizens into silence.  

5. Free Speech is Central to Union Functioning 

The court also found that the unions met the second prong of associational standing. It held that the unions’ interests in protecting their members’ rights to speak freely, organize, and advocate, are “germane” to the unions’ missions. The court put it plainly:

The freedom of Plaintiffs’ members to speak, associate, and appear publicly is not incidental to union work, but rather is the mechanism through which unions recruit, organize, communicate, and bargain. A program alleged to silence members and drive them from the unions’ rolls therefore strikes at the unions’ representational function itself.

Next Steps 

When the government surveils what people post online and threatens to punish them for their viewpoints, the result is exactly what our clients have experienced. Members have deleted their accounts, scrubbed posts, and withdrawn from union activities. 

The government must now answer our complaint and we will move forward with the discovery process, in which we anticipate getting more information from the government about its surveillance program. We look forward to continuing to prove our case. 

EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country.

Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices and homes raided, mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices seized, and judicial proceedings launched against them. 

These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted, limiting their ability to carry out legitimate human rights work, deterring participation and support, and chilling the free speech rights of not just these groups, but any organization that even reports on LGBTQ+ oppression.

A little over a week ago, an Istanbul court shut down the website and social media accounts of T24, Turkey’s longest running independent digital news organization—which has covered government-backed campaigns against and earlier crackdowns on gay rights groups—alleging it had aired “LGBT propaganda” over the past year. 

It’s all part of Turkey’s efforts to portray LGBTQ+ groups and support networks for those living with HIV as criminal organizations that must be suppressed, purportedly to protect family values. Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey (unlike Uganda, Nigeria, and Egypt, where it is criminalized), but LGBTQ+ organizations and activists have in recent years faced increased government oppression, including criminal proceedings on allegations related to obscenity and violations of Turkey’s Law on Associations, which regulates the activities of nonprofits.

In its new crackdown, the government is targeting LGBTQ+ groups’ websites and social media channels for alleged obscene posts accessible to children. Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest gay rights organization, said investigations are being led by the Cyber Crimes Bureau of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which took members of its Board of Directors into custody, raided their homes, and searched the organization’s offices, where electronic devices were seized. 

According to Human Rights Watch, prosecutors in Istanbul said those targeted were suspected of “founding, leading, or being a member of a criminal organization,” as well as sex work and drug-related offenses. Publicly available law enforcement and judicial documents about the investigation reportedly don’t say which publications or posts are alleged to be obscene.

The prosecutor’s office launched an investigation of the organization and others under Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, which regulates the offense of “obscenity” (without clearly defining it), while the overall operation, dubbed “My Family is Safe” and launched as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of the Family” program, is being brought under Article 220 of the code. Justifying the crackdown by invoking family values and child safety suggests that the government is trying to enforce a moral code on society based on intolerance of and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.

New Low for Turkey

Framing the activities of LGBTQ+ rights organizations as violations of organized crime provisions is a new low for Turkey, where free speech and press freedoms have long been under attack. The implication from these raids and investigations is that the organizations’ legitimate civil society work advocating for the rights of queer people—monitoring human rights violations, offering legal aid, running news portals, sponsoring cultural events such as symposiums and film screenings, publishing an online magazine and supporting LGBTQ+ refugees—is suspected of being criminal threatens the basic human rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Turkey.

These actions send a dangerous message to people and organizations exercising freedom of speech and association in support of queer people. Under the penal code, directing a criminal organization is punishable by five to ten years in prison, while merely being a member carries a sentence of two to five years. 

EFF joins hundreds of human, civil, LGBTQ+, and digital rights organizations around the world in calling for the immediate release of all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and legitimate human rights work, and the unblocking of all websites and social media accounts of affected organizations. 

For many LGBTQ+ individuals the world over, the internet can be a safer space for exploring identity, finding community, and seeking support. The anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown in Turkey is not happening in a vacuum—unfortunately we are seeing anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting free expression and privacy, content moderation decisions that disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ users, and other forms of intolerance around the world. 

We urge international civil society and diplomatic partners to raise awareness of and to speak out against the crackdown, and to publicly show support for the legitimacy of Turkey’s LGBTQ+ organizations and the important work they do to ensure that queer people are safe and free.

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF.

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.

For example:

• In late 2025, Australia became the first country to implement a minimum age requirement for prohibiting children under age 16 from creating or holding social media accounts. 
• India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act that includes mandatory verifiable parental consent and has undertaken ongoing discussions for social media restriction.
• The United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act requiring age verification across a swath of services hosting content considered harmful to users under 18. More than half the states across the U.S. have enacted age verification laws. 
• An EU Commission’s expert report recommends a ban on social media access for users under 13. It also recommends mandatory age verification for platforms to ensure that users are ‘age appropriate.’ 

The Access Problem 

Age verification laws that are predicated on the necessity of users possessing a current passport, driver’s license, credit card, or similar documents proving their identity exclude critical sections of populations.  And this problem is global in nature: Millions of people lack government-issued identification or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it. 

Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s license, and a further 2.6 million lack any government photo ID; leaving large groups blocked from online content or services. The UK has a similar predicament: proof-of-age checks are often reliant on passports, driver’s licenses, or other recognized alternatives, which can pose unique challenges to people without these documents.

Much of the advocacy around age verification discusses the privacy harms of age verification. Yet these measures also threaten something more fundamental: equal access to information and the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression. 

Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether. 

Effects on Global Majority Countries 

Age verification laws reshape who can speak, who can access information, and who gets excluded from the digital public sphere. In other words, age verification is not a neutral safety measure: it presents a structural barrier to disproportionately exclude certain groups—particularly those in the global majority—and alters the architecture of global online expression. Some of these groups are already marginalized offline, and age verification extends that exclusion into digital spaces.

For instance, 850 million people globally do not have ID. Most of these individuals exist in primarily low and middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The World Bank points out that many are members of marginalized groups and more than half of those lacking access to identity documentation also have children whose births have not been registered. Women are particularly vulnerable and are 8% less likely than men to have an ID. Other vulnerable groups, such as adults in low income countries, are less likely to have an ID when they fall below 25 years, as are those with a primary school education or less or those in rural areas. 

A policy paper from EDRi points out that age verification laws provide quick tech solutions but overlook longstanding structural challenges and undermine the universality of the internet. The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect. Moreover, these laws depend on the collection of harmful mass data that human rights organizations, including EFF, is fighting against—and has for decades. 

For example:

• In Morocco, a push to restrict children’s access would ban under-13s from creating accounts on gaming platforms. This could potentially create challenges for those with IDs that have incomplete information concerning the year of birth. In addition, this push would also impact those who attempt to leave Morocco.
• In Egypt, the lack of ID cards has created challenges for minority groups such as the Baha’i.
• Stateless individuals would also struggle under age verification laws. The Rohingya, the world’s largest population of stateless people, often lack IDs. 
• Kuwait’s Bidoon population also lacks proper identification materials. According to Amnesty International, this leads many to rely on standard civil identity cards, which can be restrictive.  
• Nigeria launched a national program to provide ID cards to its population in 2007. Since then, 64.4 million have registered, but that represents just over 30% of the national population.
• The Kafala system, a practice in several countries across the Middle East, also introduces challenges for age verification laws. Under this legal framework, migrant workers’ legal residency and employment status are bound to a specific employer. This potentially leaves stateless persons or migrant workers vulnerable to forced labor and restricted movements. 

No ID, No Access

Age verification laws are less about confirming the age of a user and more about creating barriers to online participation that many people cannot reliably scale. The net result is reduced access, more data collection, and an increased chance of unequal or mistaken exclusion from accessing information online. 

Nobody doubts the importance of protecting children online. While proponents assert that age verification laws protect minors from harmful material, online harassment, and digital addiction, these laws are not the solution. They subvert fundamental freedom of expression rights and pose significant privacy risks.  

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive, and as more countries considering implementing ID-based checks, the risks move beyond censorship and surveillance toward excluding some people entirely. That’s why we’re working with groups in the U.S. and around the world to push back against these laws, and why we hope you join our effort.

For more information on how to fight back against dangerous age verification laws, visit our resource hub at eff.org/age

When the rich and powerful try to use the court to silence negative reporting about themselves, it’s worth calling out that behavior for what it is: an attack on free speech. This is why EFF is happy to stand up for reporters who find themselves in that situation.

The California Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to strike a former Premise Data CEO’s meritless lawsuit against a journalist who exposed the CEO’s secret arrest for felony domestic violence. Jack Poulson, the writer and publisher of All Source Intelligence, reported details from the San Francisco Police Department’s report of the arrest and posted a copy of the report after receiving the document from a confidential source. Poulson later learned the arrest record had been sealed. The CEO, Maury Blackman, sued Poulson, Substack, AWS, and another organization for damages to try and force the removal of Poulson’s reporting from the internet.

The trial court tossed the entire case under California’s anti-SLAPP statute—SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation” and describes cases where the goal isn’t vindication in court so much as it is costing someone time, money, and peace of mind fighting the lawsuit. To fight SLAPP cases, states like California have passed anti-SLAPP laws, which are invaluable tools for protecting the First Amendment. California’s law provides an avenue for early dismissals of these baseless lawsuits, which curtails their intended effect on the target. Blackman appealed the court’s decision, arguing that a court order sealing the arrest overrides Poulson’s right to report the news.

The Court of Appeals correctly rejected Blackman’s appeal and affirmed the decision to throw out the case. The court held that the First Amendment protects Poulson’s publications. As the court explained in its decision, “the First Amendment protects the lawfully obtained truthful publication of the information at issue absent ‘a need to further a state interest of the highest order,’” a standard that Blackman’s privacy interests do not satisfy. The Court also found that Poulson, as the publisher of the All Source Intelligence newsletter, was protected by California’s Shield Law, relying on precedent established by EFF in 2006. The Court also affirmed that Substack and the other website, which had merely temporarily hosted a copy of the arrest record, were immunized from liability by Section 230.

This decision is a win for free speech, for Jack Poulson, and for everybody.  

EFF legal intern Simar Kaur also contributed to this article.

Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump administration’s use of Truth Social’s preferential treatment scheme, which blocks people who won’t pay Trump’s company up to $100,000 a month for early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.

The First Amendment guarantees that members of the public have equal access to public officials’ public comments, we reminded the court.

EFF filed an amicus brief in support of a motion for a preliminary injunction in the lawsuit filed by The Intercept Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation against President Trump and other administration officials. The lawsuit challenges their use of Truth Social as their primary social media method of making official announcements when that platform provides people who pay a fee for early access to such posts. 

Trump uses his Truth Social account as his primary means of communicating with the public, including to announce military operations and ceasefires, foreign and domestic policy, and the removal and appointment of heads of federal agencies. Earlier in the year, Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, announced “Truth API,” a service that provides investors early access to “market-moving” messages from the president and other high-ranking officials for a fee of up to $100,000 per month.

The plaintiffs, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and The Intercept, contend that the president and other officials’ preferred use of Truth Social with this service violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The plaintiffs are asking the court to immediately prevent the president from posting on Truth Social in a manner that allows him to profit from selling early access to government information.

EFF’s amicus makes two main points.

First, the brief establishes that social media is pervasively used by government officials and agencies as a medium for official communication with the public, including to disseminate critical public safety information and make official announcements.

Second, the brief explains that the challenged practice violates the First Amendment, which guarantees a right to access public officials’ public comments on equal terms with other members of the press and public. Giving some people preferential access must at a minimum be reasonably justified to satisfy First Amendment scrutiny, a test the administration does not meet.

Lining the president and his company's pockets is not a legitimate government interest for restricting timely access to the government's statements. Further, the fact that the public could ultimately access the information from other, less direct channels does not eliminate the need for First Amendment scrutiny; mere delays in timely access still trigger First Amendment scrutiny.

EFF has been advancing the First Amendment right of equal access to government’s public social media posts since at least 2018. We’ve argued that the right of equal access, which is well established in offline contexts, must apply to official government social media posts as well. This case presents an excellent opportunity for a court to directly adopt that position. 

EFF joined an amicus brief with ACLU, ACLU of D.C., National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America to urge the D.C. Circuit to vacate an FAA drone flight restriction that violated the First Amendment right to record law enforcement. This is an important case—Levine v. FAA—challenging the ability of the government to punish drone pilots who record law enforcement officers engaged in official business. 

As we wrote about earlier this year, the FAA issued a flight restriction for drones that had effectively criminalized the recording of Department of Homeland Security officers, including immigration agents from ICE and CBP, and their vehicles (what the FAA called “mobile assets” including “ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts”) even if the drone was over half a mile away. 

A drone operator, represented by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sued the FAA in March [PDF]. But in April, the FAA rescinded the flight restriction. 

The petitioner argued in his opening brief that the court should evaluate the legality of the flight restriction even though it was withdrawn. Drone pilots could still be punished for violations that occurred when the flight restriction was in effect. And the FAA could reinstate the flight restriction at any time, given that the rescission did not seem to reflect “a true change of heart” but rather an effort by the agency to avoid judicial review. 

The amicus brief, filed in support of the petitioner, noted that drones are unique because they provide “perspectives that cannot be captured by ground-based imagery,” and they “are far more maneuverable than ground-level cameras, and they are both much cheaper and much safer than using a chartered plane or helicopter to record newsworthy events from above.” The brief highlighted that drones have captured “bird’s-eye images of protest activity” and “police uses of force against protestors,” and have “allowed journalists to provide the public with up-to-the-minute information about natural disasters without putting themselves in harm’s way.” 

The brief argued that using drones to capture images and video is information-gathering activity protected by the First Amendment (similar to using cell phones to record law enforcement). The brief also argued that the FAA’s flight restriction appeared to be issued specifically to ban the recording of immigration agents and thus hinder accountability for their enforcement actions—it surely wasn’t a coincidence that the FAA imposed “no-drone zones around all roving DHS patrols just as those patrols were provoking intense national backlash.” If that’s true, it would make the FAA’s action a content-based restriction on speech that is subject to strict scrutiny—the highest First Amendment standard—and presumptively unconstitutional. And even under less rigorous standards of First Amendment scrutiny, the flight restriction is unconstitutional because the FAA can’t articulate any valid governmental interest justifying such a sweeping restriction on speech. 

Resolving this issue to protect First Amendment rights is especially urgent as government agencies continue to sink billions of dollars into technology designed to counter drones—technology that could easily be deployed against journalists and other people hoping to use drones to document government abuse.  

We urge the D.C. Circuit to review the petition and to vacate the FAA’s flight restriction, which would send a message that the government can’t avoid accountability by punishing those who exercise their First Amendment rights. 

  

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. 

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week.

The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976 has largely centered on how the law violates social media services’ First Amendment rights to curate user-generated content and present it as they see fit.

But the friend-of-the-court brief EFF filed along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Wikimedia Foundation shows that the law violates teen users’ First Amendment rights, too.

“SB 976 frustrates young people’s ability to use the internet to its full potential, prohibiting them from relying on tools that disseminate their speech and help them view and interact with other users’ speech,” the brief argues.

Recommendation systems have a dual purpose on social media: they help all users discover speech and content by other users, and to get their own speech in front of a wider audience.

“SB 976 creates significant, constitutionally violative, burdens on young users’ ability to read and comment on the news, discuss politics, find and share art, share their religious beliefs, or even practice their religion with fellow members of their faith,” the brief argues. “There is simply too much content on services for users to sift through manually, and young users may not know what to search for or even how to find content.”

Because SB 976 creates such broad burdens on teens’ ability to distribute and receive speech, it should be struck down on First Amendment grounds. But as EFF’s brief argues, the First Amendment doesn’t stop California and other states from passing laws that help all users, regardless of age, avoid major social media services’ harmful surveillance business models.

“One could imagine a law that required services to minimize the amount of data they collect, or limit using more invasive data analysis practices, such as tracking users across multiple services, analyzing keystrokes, and other surveillance-intensive practices,” the brief argues. “Such restrictions likely would serve the state’s aim of protecting all internet users—including minors—and would be more narrowly tailored to addressing the harms those practices cause than SB 976.”

A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that copyright holders can issue online takedown notices based on a subjective belief of copyright infringement, even when that belief is unreasonable and self-serving. The case was brought by our client, Channel 781 News, after takedown notices temporarily shut down the citizen journalism group's YouTube channel. We think the court set the bar far too low for copyright takedowns, and we plan to appeal.

Channel 781 is a group of independent, volunteer journalists who report on local affairs in Waltham, Massachusetts. That includes posting short, newsworthy excerpts from recordings of city government meetings produced by Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), the city's public access television station.

In September 2023, WCAC sent three copyright takedown notices to YouTube targeting fifteen of Channel 781's videos. YouTube removed the videos and, under its three-strikes policy, temporarily disabled Channel 781's entire account—just days before a local election.

Represented by EFF and Brown Rudnick LLP, Channel 781 sued WCAC under Section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provides a remedy when a copyright holder knowingly makes material misrepresentations in a takedown notice.

When Is a Copyright Holder Responsible for a Wrongful Takedown?

Fair use is the legal right to use copyrighted material without permission, when doing so serves purposes like criticism, commentary, or creating something new. Fair use is not copyright infringement, and courts have recognized that copyright holders must consider fair use before using the DMCA's powerful notice-and-takedown process.

In this case, Channel 781 argued that WCAC accused it of copyright infringement without making a good-faith assessment of whether its videos were fair use.

The evidence showed that WCAC's analysis was seriously deficient. The court noted that Chris Wangler, the WCAC employee who sent the notices, didn’t consider several facts relevant to fair use. For instance, Channel 781 used relatively small portions of WCAC's recordings, and the underlying recordings were factual public meetings, not a creative work. WCAC also gave little or no weight to whether Channel 781's use harmed any market for the recordings.

There’s also strong evidence that WCAC had motivations unrelated to copyright. WCAC objected to its footage being used to criticize local officials and advance political viewpoints. And WCAC sent the takedown notices during a local election, shortly after Channel 781 posted a campaign statement by Waltham's mayor that WCAC had mistakenly made available online.

Despite this evidence, the court concluded that WCAC had a subjective good-faith belief that Channel 781's videos were infringing. We disagree.

A Subjective Belief Should Not Be a Free Pass

Channel 781 argued that a copyright holder’s belief that material is infringing must be both genuinely held and objectively reasonable. WCAC argued that a subjective good-faith belief is good enough. Unfortunately, the court agreed with WCAC.

The court emphasized that Wangler had read up on fair use, watched a short YouTube video explaining the doctrine, and distinguished between videos he thought might qualify as fair use and those he believed did not. That was enough, the court concluded, to establish subjective good faith—even though Wangler’s analysis ignored important facts relevant to fair use. As the court put it, Section 512(f) does not require “a perfect or even reasonable fair use analysis.”

That is an alarmingly low bar for copyright holders seeking to remove someone else’s speech from the internet. A DMCA takedown can cause lawful speech to disappear almost immediately. As Channel 781 experienced, multiple notices can even result in an entire channel being disabled.

If a copyright holder can avoid liability despite a cursory, incomplete, and objectively unreasonable analysis that ignores important facts—even when there’s evidence that the copyright holder wanted to suppress critical speech—the obligation to consider fair use risks becoming little more than a box-checking exercise. That interpretation threatens to strip Section 512(f) of much of its force.

Even Under a Subjective Standard, WCAC Fell Short

Even accepting the court’s subjective standard, WCAC's cursory consideration of fair use should not have been enough. WCAC disregarded important fair use considerations, and the record included statements suggesting that it believed people generally needed permission to reuse its footage—an understanding at odds with fair use. There was also evidence that WCAC objected to Channel 781's political use of its footage, and had motivations for the takedowns unrelated to copyright.

Taken together, these facts raise serious questions about whether WCAC genuinely considered fair use, rather than using copyright as a rationale for removing material it did not like.

The Court Did Not Find That Channel 781's Videos Infringed

Importantly, the court's analysis recognized Channel 781’s strong fair use argument: the group used short excerpts from factual recordings of public government proceedings, selecting clips for their newsworthiness, and making them easier for the public and journalists to find, share, and discuss.

The opinion even states that WCAC's fair use analysis “may have been deficient.” But under the purely subjective standard it adopted, the court concluded that it could not reject WCAC's professed belief—even if the court itself “would have reached the opposite conclusion” on fair use.

We plan to appeal this decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Copyright law should not allow a rightsholder to suppress critical reporting or political speech through the DMCA and escape accountability simply by claiming it believed the speech was infringing. Section 512(f) is supposed to provide protection against wrongful takedowns. We will keep fighting to ensure that safeguard actually protects people. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted unlawful investigations into dozens of individuals who have documented ICE activities in their communities, social media users who criticized the government, and international students who attended a protest.

A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subscriber data about their users. For example, from 2018 to 2020, ICE sent nearly 500 administrative subpoenas to Meta, Google, and Twitter (now X), according to documents obtained by Just Futures Law. In just the second half of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent 21 administrative subpoenas to Reddit, according to its Transparency Report.

While some subpoenas are routine, ICE has been forced to withdraw others after users challenged them in court or companies pushed back. These challenged subpoenas exceeded the agency's statutory authority and violated users' First Amendment rights.

Below is a non-comprehensive list of DHS subpoenas that we gathered going back to 2025, looking at public reporting and court cases. This is likely an undercount. The full scope is hard to pin down because these subpoenas typically only come to light when a user is given notice and challenges them in court, or when a company documents them in a transparency report (so far, only Reddit appears to break out specific numbers on DHS subpoenas). In addition, DHS has been slow to respond to our Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits seeking records that would show how many administrative subpoenas ICE has sent to social media companies since 2025.

If you know of other subpoenas that are not on this list, please reach out to info@eff.org. While the government has abused the subpoena process in other areas, particularly to hospitals, this list focuses on DHS and ICE subpoenas to technology companies for user data. 

DATE ISSUED (and link to subpoena)	TARGETED COMPANY	INDIVIDUAL USER TARGETED	OUTCOME
3/17/25	Facebook	Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest	Withdrawn
3/23/25	Google	Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest	Withdrawn
4/1/25	Google	Amandla Thomas-Johnson, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest	Google disclosed data to ICE on 5/8/25
9/4/25	Meta	6 accounts in Southern California that documented immigration activity, including LB_Protest, Long Beach Rapid Response Network, and Stopice.net	Withdrawn after court challenge on 11/24/25
9/11/25*	Meta (Instagram)	Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity	Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26
9/11/25*	Meta (Facebook)	Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity	Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26
10/30/25	Google	Retired Philadelphia user who emailed criticism to U.S. prosecutor	Withdrawn after court challenge on 2/5/26
2/4/26*	Google	Social media user who regularly posts criticism of the President	Subpoena challenged in Court
2/19/26*	Reddit	"Tired_Thumb," user who posted about ICE officer	Withdraw after court challenge on 3/27/26; replaced with grand jury subpoena
2/27/26*	X	"podslurp,” who posted publicly available address information about ICE officer	Withdrawn May 2026; replaced with grand jury subpoena
3/7/26	PayPal/Venmo	"Voices of Racial Justice," a racial justice organization in Minnesota	PayPal/Venmo disclosed data 3/20/26
4/3/26*	Google (YouTube)	@TheDonLemonShow, GeorgiaFort, @DemocracyNow, and seven other accounts that reported on protest at Minnesota church	Google Objected 4/7/26
4/12/26*	T-Mobile	Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort and others	T-Mobile disclosed data on 4/12/26
First half of 2025	Reddit	Reddit account	Subpoena withdrawn after questions from Reddit
Second half of 2025	Reddit	11 Reddit accounts that posted content "critical of ICE actions"	3 subpoenas withdrawn after Reddit objected

* = denotes summonses issued under 19 U.S.C. 1509, an authority that has been abused in the past, according to DHS's inspector general.

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests. And the data minimization and security measures don’t keep states from using data collected under the agreement for other law enforcement purposes – which could include things like criminal investigations of abortions or gender-affirming care. 

Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech.  

The court in June issued a new decision clarifying elements of its 2025 finding that the previous liability regime was partially unconstitutional. The government also published in late May two presidential decrees that detail how the new rules apply. 

Under the new regime, social media platforms and other internet applications that curate or interfere with posts can be held liable for third-party content if they don’t remove it after being notified by the user seeking take down unless there's a reasonable doubt that the content is unlawful. For certain specific cases, like crimes against honor (e.g. defamation), platform liability still depends on failing to comply with a judicial order.  

For some serious crimes, like human trafficking and crimes against women, applications have a duty of care to remove related content immediately and can be held liable when systemically failing to do so. The precise limits of what constitutes a systemic failure are still unclear. There are also stricter rules for paid ads, boosted content, and bots. 

The previous regime, set by Article 19 of the law known as the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (“Marco Civil da Internet” in Portuguese), sought to protect freedom of expression online by holding internet application providers liable for user content if they failed to comply with a judicial order to remove it. There were specific, limited exceptions to this rule, like the unauthorized disclosure of nude or private sexual images. This was meant to prevent providers from over-removal of user content to avoid legal action. Yet, the court found that this provision failed to sufficiently safeguard democracy and fundamental rights. 

We outlined the thorny context leading to this shift in Brazil’s intermediary liability rules, including Big Tech’s alignment with the far right and hurdles to approve platform regulation in Congress, through a proper legislative process. 

Brazil’s shift is part of broader discussions and changes in response to growing concerns over online harms and digital platforms’ abuses. However, responses focused on platforms’ liability of user-generated content carry important traps and risks—from entrenching dominant platforms’ power over the information flow to escalating arbitrary online surveillance and censorship. The path ahead must prevent this to the extent possible, and the new presidential decrees provide a mixed contribution towards this task. 

New Decrees: Strengths and Flaws  

The government published two decrees regulating the new regime set by the Supreme Court. One introduces changes to its previous regulation, the Decree 8.771/2016, detailing elements of the decision, including additional duties that the court only briefly addressed (Decree 12.975). The other regulates measures to tackle violence against women online (Decree 12.976). 

The Supreme Court's decision didn't establish guidelines to protect users' due process rights when facing content take down and removal demands. Instead, it relies on providers to self regulate, which could lead to over censorship.  

The decrees’ provisions on user notification systems are helpful in this sense. They stipulate that providers must inform users (both the notifier and the content author) about the decision to remove or keep the content up, why, and the means to appeal. The guidance makes explicit that a platform may reconsider and reinstate content after an appeal and must explain its reasons to the party requesting removal and content author. The decrees also address concerns with the weaponization of notification systems, establishing that internet applications must adopt measures to prevent abuses. 

Decree 12.795 reinforces that applications can keep content up after notification when there’s reasonable doubt that the post is unlawful, stating that the analysis should consider the context of the publications, freedom of religion and belief, and any informational, educational, or critical, satirical, or parodic purpose with the aim of ensuring freedom of expression. With these guidelines, it aims to mirror the Digital Services Act's "notice-and-action" approach. Moreover, for sexual related, intimate content, platforms will provide a specific and easily accessible notice channel where victims or their representatives can follow the case. 

One of the most concerning provisions requires applications to proactively report content related to criminal conduct on their platforms to government authorities. Applications must send the post along with information that can identify the user. The Ministry of Justice will regulate this provision, something the Supreme Court didn't touch on in its decision. While it seems to apply just to those providers already required to comply with new content-related obligations (exempting email and videoconference providers, for example), it takes a disastrous step beyond. It’s not only about preventing the spread of unlawful content online; it gets platforms to police and report users to authorities by handing identification information apparently without a court order. 

Decree 12.795 also details the definition of messaging applications that are exempt from notice and duty of care obligations. It excludes features for public dissemination of content and open groups so that the exemption doesn't apply. It's still unclear what exactly open groups mean. Especially regarding end-to-end encrypted applications, it's crucial that duties to monitor and take down don't affect conversations that are under this security architecture. Perhaps more troubling, the Supreme Court stated in its clarification ruling that a judicial order can determine email, voice and video conference, and messaging providers to take down content of private communications. Any measure must respect privacy and free expression safeguards and refrain from undermining end-to-end encryption. 

Furthermore, decree 12.976 importantly addresses the protection of women online, but it contains a broad definition of online violence against women that will guide how platforms handle takedown notices they receive. This definition involves "any act, conduct, or omission that causes (...) psychological, political, or economic suffering (…) in any aspect of their lives, committed, instigated, facilitated, or aggravated, in whole or in part, by the use of digital technologies." Its breadth could unfortunately result in censoring legitimate criticism and other protected speech, which platforms and authorities must avoid. 

The decrees also establish powers to the Brazilian Data Protection Agency (ANPD) to oversee and regulate the new regime. Among controversies, the decrees give ANPD the power to apply penalties for breaches of content-related obligations. These obligations go beyond agency competencies set in the Data Protection Law and the Law 15.211/2025, focused on the online protection of children and adolescents. They are also not clearly covered by Article 12 of Marco Civil as it stipulates administrative penalties for violations of its data privacy provisions.  

We appreciate that ANPD has been open to civil society's demands and concerns. While it’s crucial that the agency conducts its oversight role preserving a proportionality commitment and keeping solid participation channels, sanction powers must be prescribed by law. 

Alerts for the Path Ahead 

It’s true that there are critical platform accountability problems we must address, especially regarding the big players. And yes, platforms should align their policies and practices with human rights standards, including by dealing diligently with the dissemination of unlawful, toxic content. But accountability efforts should look at platforms’ systems and processes and promote measures to put checks on the power of tech giants, instead of having a prevalent focus on policing and reporting user behavior.  

Key digital competition measures to regulate gatekeeper platforms are under discussion in bill 4675/2025, but the proposal is pending in Congress with no clear timeline for approval.  

One important measure is to ensure accountability of take-down requests, including by the government. The Supreme Court’s decision stipulated that internet applications should publish transparency reports of the removal notices they receive. Government institutions should follow suit by periodically disclosing aggregate data of their own requests to online platforms, covering various types of user data and demands for content and account restrictions. Back in 2016, Marco Civil’s regulation decree established that all federal bodies must annually publish statistical reports on their requests of subscriber data to providers. To the best of our knowledge, federal bodies generally fail to meet this provision. ANPD can play a crucial role in stepping up transparency in the implementation of the new rules. 

Ultimately, platform accountability under the new liability regime hinges on how accountable its application will be by platforms and state institutions, and on the regime's commitment to protecting fundamental rights, including freedom of expression and privacy.  

  

 

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government.

As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When companies receive these unlawful subpoenas, they should be clear with the public that they will not hand over the data unless a court compels them to do so. In addition, companies themselves can take the government to court to challenge these unlawful subpoenas on behalf of their users.

ICE has sent hundreds of subpoenas to large technology companies like Google, Meta, and Reddit.

Publicly challenging these unlawful subpoenas in court has the dual purpose of protecting individual users who may lack the resources or know-how to challenge a subpoena on their own, while also discouraging ICE from issuing similarly unlawful subpoenas in the future.

Companies have a responsibility to protect the privacy of their users. That responsibility does not end simply because companies wish to avoid the ire of this administration—which has sought to chill other powerful institutions like news outlets, law firms, universities, and non-profits.

ICE Has Issued Many Unlawful Subpoenas

ICE has sent hundreds of subpoenas to large technology companies like Google, Meta, and Reddit seeking basic subscriber information like name, email address, IP address, and session times.

Some of these subpoenas have targeted people who engaged in protected activity—like tracking immigration actions, criticizing the government, or attending a protest. People have a First Amendment right to document law enforcement activities and criticize the government online, without retaliatory government investigations. This right has become more important as immigration agents have engaged in invasive, unconstitutional, and sometimes violent conduct.

In a handful of cases, users themselves have successfully pushed back. After receiving notice of these subpoenas, users have challenged them in court, relying on pro-bono lawyers from groups like the ACLU or Civil Liberties Defense Center. Companies have been largely absent from these court proceedings.

Private Pushback from Meta and Reddit

While not appearing in court, companies like Meta and Reddit have sometimes pushed back behind the scenes.

For example, on September 11, 2025, ICE sent administrative subpoenas to Meta seeking to unmask users who ran Instagram and Facebook accounts that tracked immigration activity in Pennsylvania. On September 19, 2025, Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team told ICE that the agency did not have the “statutory authorization” to seek the records. It asked for more detail about the investigation and said “Meta will take no further action with respect to this summons until it receives this information.” Later, Meta informed ICE that it planned to notify the users about the subpoenas, since no gag order had been obtained. The government disclosed this information in one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against ICE and other agencies.

On October 3, 2025, Meta notified the user about the subpoena. Despite its private pushback, Meta told the users it would comply with the subpoenas unless they mounted a court challenge within 10 days—which they did with the help of the ACLU. Ultimately, ICE withdrew the subpoenas when it became likely that ICE would lose the case in court.

In another example, Reddit documented its pushback in a transparency report released a few months ago. Reddit reported that in the second half of 2025, the company received three Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subpoenas seeking account information from 11 users who posted content critical of ICE. In the report, the company stated that “Reddit objected to these legal demands because the users appeared to be engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment, and law enforcement withdrew their requests.” The company reported that most other DHS subpoenas it received appeared to be routine.

A Tech Company Model for Public Resistance

EFF’s demand that technology companies do more to protect their users is not unprecedented. Twitter (now X) did so successfully in the first Trump administration.

On April 6 2017, Twitter went to court to challenge a DHS subpoena that sought to unmask a Twitter account named “@ALT_USCIS,” which frequently criticized the administration’s immigration policies. Twitter challenged the subpoena on both statutory and First Amendment grounds. A day later, DHS withdrew the subpoena and Twitter dismissed the case. The incident led to an inspector general investigation, which criticized a tactic that DHS is still engaged in.

In other circumstances, companies have also gone to court to protect their users and shield themselves from burdensome legal process. In 2013, Microsoft challenged a search warrant for the content of emails stored on servers outside the United States. In 2015, Apple challenged a court order to break the security of its iPhone during an investigation into the San Bernardino shootings. And in 2007, Yahoo challenged the constitutionality of government requests at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Imagine if McDonald’s could use trademark law to control how you use the term “fast food.” Or if the Canadian government could stop you from using the word “Canada” in the title of a book about the country and its people. That wouldn’t just be absurd; it would be an unacceptable obstacle to criticism of and commentary about those institutions. Yet the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the “LDS Church”) has a track record of claiming exactly that kind of authority over the word “Mormon,” using the threat of expensive litigation to pressure speakers into compliance.

We at EFF have opposed the LDS Church’s abuse of trademark law for over a decade. In 2014, we filed an amicus brief when the church sued an online dating service for church members called Mormon Match. In 2016, it threatened legal action against our client the Mormon Mental Health Association, a nonprofit association for mental health professionals who work with members of Mormon faiths. In 2025, the church tried to pressure our client Burke Sorenson into changing the name of his Mormon News Roundup podcast. Now, the LDS Church has brought a lawsuit over a podcast called Mormon Stories that examines Mormonism and Mormon culture. With the help of attorneys at Ballard Spahr, EFF has filed an amicus brief in the case.

Our brief urges the district court to dismiss the case as soon as possible. Trademark is supposed to be about helping consumers identify the sources of the products they buy, not controlling criticism. That’s why our brief asks the court to use a test that’s more protective of speech than what’s applied in most trademark cases. This test, known as the Rogers test, has been adopted by many courts (but not yet this one) for cases where someone is using a trademark as part of an expressive work, rather than just as a brand name. We explain to the court that the Rogers test is an important First Amendment safeguard in part because it makes it easier to throw out meritless trademark claims before the most expensive parts of litigation, allowing more speakers to confidently stand up for their rights.

Our brief goes on to explain that First Amendment safeguards are especially important in cases like this one, where a plaintiff is seeking to control the use of a common term for its common meaning. Trademark law isn’t even supposed to extend to generic terms, and for good reason. Otherwise, we risk giving trademark owners power to control discussion and debate over entire topics.

It’s about time that a court shut down the LDS Church’s trademark bullying. We hope the court will do so here, while also taking the opportunity to endorse the Rogers test.

Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions.

That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board in its consideration of a case involving an Instagram post about prescription drugs during pregnancy and childbirth. The case touches upon a topic we’ve been documenting for some time; last year we collected stories from individuals who had experienced censorship of reproductive health information on various platforms. Meta in particular stood out: Its moderation systems routinely fail to distinguish between prohibited drug transactions and legitimate discussion of medications, including educational information and people's firsthand experiences with healthcare.

Through our Stop Censoring Abortion project, EFF collected nearly 100 submissions from healthcare providers, clinics, educators, advocates, researchers, and others whose reproductive health content had been removed or suppressed by social media platforms. What we found was alarming: systemic over-enforcement, confusing policies, arbitrary takedowns, sudden account bans, de-ranking, and appeals that too often went nowhere.

Talking About Medication Isn't the Same as Selling It

In almost every case we reviewed, the censored posts and accounts did not actually violate the platforms' stated rules. Meta frequently cited its Restricted Goods and Services policy, which prohibits attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or request pharmaceutical drugs. But the content EFF documented overwhelmingly consisted of factual or educational information—not attempts to sell or distribute drugs.

The consequences were significant. For example, the Miscarriage+Abortion Hotline had its Instagram account restricted and posts removed even though it was providing information about legally obtaining medication rather than offering pharmaceuticals for sale. Red River Women's Clinic and the RISE reproductive health research center at Emory University had accounts locked after posting about mifepristone.

Other users reported having their content quietly de-ranked or “shadowbanned,” limiting its reach without giving them meaningful notice or recourse. We believe educational content and people's experiences involving reproductive healthcare and medication should not be suppressed in this way.

And when Meta gets these decisions wrong, the appeals process too often fails to fix them. In several cases EFF documented, accounts were restored only after journalists drew attention to the problem or someone with a personal connection inside Meta intervened. A moderation system shouldn't require knowing the right person to get an erroneous decision reversed.

Meta Can—and Must—Do Better

Our submission calls on Meta to make five changes—the same five changes we asked for last year.

First, Meta should publish clear, understandable policies so users can know what content is permitted and what might result in removal, downranking, or account suspension. Second, those rules must be enforced consistently and fairly. Third, Meta must provide meaningful explanations for enforcement decisions, including what rule was violated and how users can appeal. Fourth, users need a functional appeals system that doesn't depend on insider access.

Finally, Meta should expand human review. Reproductive healthcare is precisely the sort of nuanced and context-dependent subject that automated moderation systems struggle to understand. As our research shows, automated systems can mistake education for drug sales, misinterpret terminology, overlook cultural and political context, and even classify legitimate advocacy as dangerous content. Human moderators should therefore play a greater role when automated systems flag sensitive healthcare information or political expression.

Meta has chosen to allow discussion of reproductive healthcare, including abortion, on its platforms. That commitment means little if its moderation systems nevertheless prevent people from accessing or sharing that information.

At a moment when reproductive rights are under attack around the world, the stakes are particularly high. Restricting access to essential healthcare information can have profound consequences, especially for people who already face barriers to reproductive care.

Users deserve a system in which rules aren't applied arbitrarily, appeals actually work, and vital health information isn't silenced because an automated system failed to understand its context. Meta can—and must—do better.

You can read our comment in full below.