Ride the Lightning

Electronic Frontier Foundation Takes On Online Speech Moderation with TOSsed Out

June 3, 2019

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced on May 20th that it had launched TOSsed Out, a new iteration of EFF’s longstanding work in tracking and documenting the ways that Terms of Service (TOS) and other speech moderating rules are unevenly and unthinkingly applied to people by online services. As a result of these practices, posts are deleted and accounts banned, harming those for whom the internet is an irreplaceable forum to express ideas, connect with others, and find support.

TOSsed Out continues in the vein of Onlinecensorship.org, which EFF launched in 2014 to collect reports from users in an effort to encourage social media companies to operate with greater transparency and accountability as they regulate speech. TOSsed Out will highlight the myriad ways that all kinds of people are negatively affected by these rules and their uneven enforcement.

As many of you probably know, the White House recently launched a tool for people to report incidents of “censorship” on social media, following the President’s repeated allegations of a bias against conservatives in how these companies apply their rules. In reality, commercial content moderation practices negatively affect all kinds of people, especially people who already face marginalization. We’ve seen everything from Black women flagged for sharing their experiences of racism to sex educators whose content is deemed too risqué. TOSsed Out will show that trying to censor social media at scale ends up removing legal, protected speech that should be allowed on platforms.

TOSsed Out’s debut is the result of brainstorming, research, design, and writing work that began in late 2018 after the EFF saw an uptick in takedowns resulting from increased public and government pressure, as well as the rise in automated tools. You can find the TOSsed Out website here. It provides some examples of online content moderation gone astray – with future examples to be added. The EFF is attempting to make clear the need for companies to embrace the Santa Clara Principles which it created to establish a human rights framework for online speech moderation, require transparency about content removal, and specify appeals processes to help users get their content back online.

People rely on Internet platforms to share experiences and build communities, and not everyone has good alternatives to speak out or stay in touch when a tech company censors or bans them. Rules need to be clear, processes need to be transparent, and appeals need to be accessible.

Amen to all of that. It is currently a sea of confusion, with the right to post legal, protected speech often lost in the process.

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