No single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire internet. That's why EFF celebrates the news that Australia's eSafety Commissioner is dropping its legal effort to have content on X taken down across the globe. This development comes just days after EFF and FIRE were granted official intervener status in the case.
Holding social media companies responsible for the content they host is a better solution in my view. We hold newspapers responsible. Why not social media? Yes, moderation is expensive but they are wildly profitable, musk aside.
They don’t need to moderate everything, as the content volume is high, but they certainly could manually moderate all content that reaches a certain threshd. They choose not to and hide behind their users sharing as a reason.
That would be very bad for free speech. Companies would not take any chances and would remove any content that could remotely bring them trouble. I’m sure there would be lots of bad takedowns and it would be abused just like the DMCA.
Holding social media companies responsible for the content they host is a better solution in my view. We hold newspapers responsible. Why not social media? Yes, moderation is expensive but they are wildly profitable, musk aside.
They don’t need to moderate everything, as the content volume is high, but they certainly could manually moderate all content that reaches a certain threshd. They choose not to and hide behind their users sharing as a reason.
That would be very bad for free speech. Companies would not take any chances and would remove any content that could remotely bring them trouble. I’m sure there would be lots of bad takedowns and it would be abused just like the DMCA.