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Social Media Platforms Increase Transparency About Content Removal Requests, But Many Keep Users in the Dark When Their Speech Is Censored, EFF Report Shows

Who Has Your Back Spotlights Good, and Not So Good, Content Moderation Policies

San Francisco and Tunis, Tunisia—While social media platforms are increasingly giving users the opportunity to appeal decisions to censor their posts or shut down their accounts, very few platforms comprehensively commit to notifying users that their content has been removed in the first place, raising questions about their accountability and transparency, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a new report.
How users are supposed to challenge content removals that they’ve never been told about is among the key issues illuminated by EFF in the second installment of its Who Has Your Back: Censorship Edition report. The paper comes amid a wave of new government regulations and actions around the world meant to rid platforms of extremist content. But in response to calls to remove objectionable content, social media companies and platforms have all too oftencensored valuable speech.
EFF examined the content moderation policies of 16 platforms and app stores, including Facebook, Twitter, the Apple App Store, and Instagram. Only four companies—Facebook, Reddit, Apple, and GitHub—commit to notifying users when any content is censored and specifying the legal request or community guideline violation that led to the removal. While Twitter notifies users when tweets are removed, it carves out an exception for tweets related to “terrorism,” a class of content that is difficult to accurately identify and can include counter-speech or documentation of war crimes. Notably, Facebook and GitHub were found to have more comprehensive notice policies than their peers.
“Providing an appeals process is great for users, but its utility is undermined by the fact that users can’t count on companies to tell them when or why their content is taken down,” said Gennie Gebhart, EFF associate director of research, who co-authored the report. “Notifying people when their content has been removed or censored is a challenge when your users number in the millions or billions, but social media platforms should be making investments to provide meaningful notice.”
In the report, EFF awarded stars in six categories, including transparency reporting of government takedown requests, providing meaningful notice to users when content or accounts are removed, allowing users to appeal removal decisions, and public support of the Santa Clara Principles, a set of guidelines for speech moderation based on a human rights framework. The report was released today at the RightsCon summit on human rights in the digital age, held in Tunis, Tunisia.
Reddit leads the pack with six stars, followed by Apple’s App Store and GitHub with five stars, and Medium, Google Play, and YouTube with four stars. Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest and Snap each improved their scores over the past year since our inaugural censorship edition of Who Has Your Back in 2018.  Nine companies meet our criteria for transparency reporting of takedown requests from governments, and 11 have appeals policies, but only one—Reddit—discloses the number of appeals it receives. Reddit also takes the extra step of disclosing the percentage of appeals resolved in favor of or against the appeal.
Importantly, 12 companies are publicly supporting the Santa Clara Principles, which outline a set of minimum content moderation policy standards in three areas: transparency, notice, and appeals.
“Our goal in publishing Who Has Your Back is to inform users about how transparent social media companies are about content removal and encourage improved content moderation practices across the industry,” said EFF Director of International Free Expression Jillian York. “People around the world rely heavily on social media platforms to communicate and share ideas, including activists, dissidents, journalists, and struggling communities. So it’s important for tech companies to disclose the extent to which governments censor speech, and which governments are doing it.”
For the report:
https://www.eff.org/wp/who-has-your-back-2019
For more on platform censorship:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/christchurch-call-good-not-so-good-and-ugly

Contact:  Gennie Gebhart Associate Director of Research gennie@eff.org Andrew Crocker Senior Staff Attorney andrew@eff.org

Curbing your enthusiasm for overeating

Signals between our gut and brain control how and when we eat food. But how the molecular mechanisms involved in this signaling are affected when we eat a high-energy diet and how they contribute to obesity are not well understood. Using a mouse model, a research team led by a biomedical scientists has found that overactive endocannabinoid signaling in the gut drives overeating in diet-induced obesity by blocking gut-brain satiation signaling.

Millions of cardiovascular deaths attributed to not eating enough fruits and vegetables

Preliminary findings from a new study reveal that inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption may account for millions of deaths from heart disease and strokes each year. The study estimated that roughly 1 in 7 cardiovascular deaths could be attributed to not eating enough fruit and 1 in 12 cardiovascular deaths could be attributed to not eating enough vegetables.

There Is Something Called “Forever Chemicals” Coursing Through the US Food Supply

These chemicals take millennia to break down, have negative health consequences, and Tuesday the FDA revealed they exist throughout the US food supply. Concerns about per- and polyfluoroalykyl substances (PFAS), have typically been associated more with water than food. But when the FDA decided to look at the food supply, they found considerable levels of […]

Why You’re Not Hearing About America’s Wars

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Democratic Candidates Seem Pretty Confused About Medicare for All

The lead author of the House of Representatives’ Medicare for All bill has been reaching out to Democratic presidential campaigns in an effort to remedy what she views as misrepresentations of the legislation by some of the candidates. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tells Mother Jones that while she’s thrilled to see so many serious White […]

Thinking about how intimidating Mastodon can seem because you have to scroll through a huge list of instances and pick one and try your luck, rather than just going to "the bird website" or "the facebook" and signing up.

But then, like - that's how it always used to be? That's what forums were like, you found one randomly, you took your chances, and it worked out or it didn't.

How quickly big tech conditioned us to fear choice and mistrust the unknown, I guess. Anyway uhhh piss piss ass piss ass

Missouri Governor Mike Parson on Requiring Pelvic Exams Before Abortions

Of course they’re necessary.

Clearing the Room

Who cares about your actual constituency when there’s swing voters out there?

The State of Social Media Today

Every year, Bond Capital’s Mary Meeker produces an immense slide deck of internet trends. You can see the whole thing here. I’ve chosen two slides to highlight. First, there’s this one. Before you look, see if you can figure out what I find interesting about it. Granted, this is only two years of data, but […]

What desktop Mastodon client are people using? I mostly use Tootle but it's simply too bugy; I'm tired of it. Is there anything else that is not some electron trash?

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Ways and Means Committee Chair Doesn’t Want Medicare-for-All Hearing to Mention “Medicare for All”

Rep. Richard Neal told fellow Democrats on the committee that the hearing should instead focus on ways to achieve “universal health care.”

The post Ways and Means Committee Chair Doesn’t Want Medicare-for-All Hearing to Mention “Medicare for All” appeared first on The Intercept.

Hundreds of Thousands of People Want the DNC to Have a Climate Debate

The pressure for a debate on climate change is only escalating since the Democratic National Committee rejected a call to devote one of its dozen debates to a subject that’s grown in urgency and salience among the Democratic base. Frontrunner Joe Biden has seemingly threw his support behind a climate change debate, saying “I’m all […]

Forest twice size of UK destroyed in decade for big consumer brands – report | Global development | The Guardian https://prismo.xyz/posts/77865bfd-6039-47b3-b55c-66eaed9eff4c

ICE Is Sending Asylum-Seekers to the Private Prison Where Mother Jones Exposed Abuse

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Pirates Press releases 4-way splie with CRIM, Antagonizers ATL, NOI!SE, and Rude Pride

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The post Pirates Press releases 4-way splie with CRIM, Antagonizers ATL, NOI!SE, and Rude Pride appeared first on Dying Scene.

How Russia Can Spend Money to Influence the 2020 Election—Legally

In April 2018, a steel pipe manufacturer called Wheatland Tube gave $1 million to the super-PAC supporting Donald Trump’s reelection and the campaigns of Trump-allied Republicans. Around the same time, the CEO of its parent company, Barry Zekelman, dined with Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. in a private dining room at the Trump […]

Is Our EPA Chief Stupid or Evil?

In most studies of new drugs, half the patients are given the experimental drug and the other half are given a placebo. It’s a “blinded” study because the patients don’t know which they’ve been given. In a double-blinded study, the doctors don’t know either. Andrew Wheeler, head of the EPA, is a wee bit confused […]