Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context, and these concerns are further troubling when the involvement originates with law enforcement.
When sites cooperate with government agencies, it leaves the platform inherently biased in favor of the government’s favored positions. It gives government entities outsized influence to manipulate content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for government—and particularly law enforcement—to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.
For example, Vietnam has boasted of its increasing effectiveness in getting Facebook posts removed but has been accused of targeting dissidents in doing so. Similarly, the Israeli Cyber Unit has boasted of high compliance rates of up to 90 percent with its takedown requests across all social media platforms. But these requests unfairly target Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society, and one such incident prompted the Facebook Oversight Board to recommend that Facebook “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.”
Issues with government involvement in content moderation were addressed in the newly revised Santa Clara Principles 2.0 where EFF and other organizations called on social media companies to “recognize the parti
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