Censorship

Building a consensus to change Section 230 will be harder than it looks. The law’s critics have vastly different and sometimes incompatible ideas about how the law should work. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike have called for sites to bear more legal liability if users post illegal content.

One of the US government’s strongest forces for internet freedom is in danger, and supporters are calling on the public for help. The Open Technology Fund (OTF), a small US organization devoted to protecting digital speech across the world, has helped support nearly all of the most prominent encryption projects at various points — including Signal, Tails, Qubes, and the Tor Project. But after the abrupt firing of the fund’s entire leadership team, current recipients say their contractually promised funding is now at risk.

Concerning President Donald Trump's Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, I first want to talk about process and why the FCC needs to keep it from dragging out. Second, I want to move on to the question of the FCC’s rulemaking authority here. And finally, I want to raise some key questions around the substance of the Executive Order. 1) Given the role Section 230 has played in shaping American life online, we have to get this right. And we need to act quickly. 2) I am skeptical that there’s any role for the FCC here.

Senate Subcommittee on The Constitution Chairman Ted Cruz (R-TX) sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai raising concerns about Google's latest actions to censor political speech with which it disagrees.

Voice of America is one of the largest and most trusted independent news agencies in the world. Efforts to blacklist VOA journalists from interview requests to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are an unprecedented attack on press freedom in the United States. VOA is often one of the few critical and independent voices available in countries without a free press, such as Russia and China.

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a Senate resolution condemning attacks against members of the media and reaffirming the centrality of a free and independent press and peaceful assembly to the health of democracy in the US. The resolution comes in the wake of the arrest on May 29 of CNN reporters covering protests in Minnesota. This was just one of dozens of reported instances of journalists and photographers being roughly handled by police officers while covering nationwide protests even after having identified themselves as members of the press.

Sens Marco Rubio (R-FL), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) requested that the Federal Communication Commission take a fresh look at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and clearly define the criteria for which companies can receive protections under the statute.

Every year, the advocacy group Freedom House releases a survey and analysis of Internet and digital media freedom around the world.

The existential question that every big tech platform from Twitter to Google to Facebook has to wrestle with is the same: How responsible should it act for the content that people post? The answer that Silicon Valley has come up with for decades is: Less is more. But now, as protests of police brutality continue across the country, many in the tech industry are questioning the wisdom of letting all flowers bloom online.

The Center for Democracy & Technology filed a lawsuit against President Trump’s “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship,” signed May 28, 2020. The suit argues that the Executive Order violates the First Amendment by curtailing and chilling the constitutionally protected speech of online platforms and individuals.