Tech Policy Press – Anonymity Online Keeps Pregnant People Safe
This op-ed – authored by CDT’s Aliya Bhatia – first appeared in Tech Policy Press on June 25, 2024. A portion of the text has been pasted below.
In the two years since the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health upended the lives of people who can get pregnant, access to safe abortions and reproductive care more broadly has only become more difficult. And the number of spaces–especially online spaces–where someone can be scrutinized or punished for seeking information about abortions and other sensitive reproductive health information has only increased.
That’s a dangerous trend. One way to keep pregnant people, those that can get pregnant, and their allies safe: protect their anonymity online.
Pregnant people who seek abortions make a deeply private decision in the face of many obstacles, including public pressure and stigma, barriers to healthcare, and even domestic violence from an abusive partner. After the Dobbs decision, civil litigation, criminal investigation, or even prosecution are very real possibilities facing some people who seek abortions. People who seek abortions now navigate a complex maze of rules and opinions all designed to not only undermine autonomy for those who can get pregnant, but actively put them in harm’s way. Similar threats face those who merely provide information about abortion or other forms of reproductive healthcare, and law enforcement have consistently used information collected online to make their case. In Nebraska, for instance, direct messages on Facebook between a woman and her daughter were submitted as evidence to arrest the mother for aiding an abortion.
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.
