CDT Joins Global Civil Society Orgs in Urging Indian Government to Withdraw IT Rules Amendments That Threaten Press Freedoms
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) joins a statement – signed by Access Now and numerous local and global digital rights organizations – urging the Indian government to withdraw amendments to the IT Rules that creates a new “fact check unit of the central government” to deem and ultimately order the removal of “fake or false or misleading” media coverage. As this government has shown repeatedly in the past, what is considered fake or false media can be any form of lawful speech including media coverage that sheds light on human rights and abuses of power.
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From the letter: “The IT Rules, 2023, grant the government arbitrary, overbroad, and unchecked censorship powers that threaten the rights to freedom of expression and opinion enshrined in the Indian Constitution and under international human rights law.”
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
